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Larry Houston

Identifying
a
“Homosexual”
Identifying a “Homosexual”
Larry Houston

Identifying
a
“Homosexual”

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Copyright © 2015 Larry Houston. All rights reserved.
Published at www.banap.net.
Chapter 1
Essentialism or Social Constructionism

Does a homosexual exist just as mankind is of the species,


Homo Sapiens? Is a homosexual orientation intimately
intertwined with a person’s true identity as a human being?
When using the term homosexual, is one accurately defining a
person’s self, his inner core, and the nature of his being? If it is
true, then homosexuality may be implied as natural, and that it
is essential to their human wholeness. There are those
advocating for homosexuality who hold such a view, that one is
born a homosexual. But there are others advocating for
homosexuality who hold a conflicting view, that homosexuality
only has the meaning which is given to it by the society and
culture it is a part of.
These conflicting views are usually framed by the
parameters of the words essentialism and social
constructionism. This discussion of the causes of
homosexuality is usually a philosophical tug of war with
conflicting ideologies.
“Various theories of homosexuality are derived from either
an essentialist approach or a social constructionist approach.
Essentialism claims that homosexuality is a construct that is
both ahistorical and acultural, a part of human civilization for
all time; whereas constructionialsm suggests homosexuality is
defined more by temporal periods and cultural context.”
(Sullivan, Homophobia, History, and Homosexuality: Trends for Sexual
Minorities, p. 3 in Sexual Minorities: Discrimination, Challenges, and
Development in American, Michael K. Sullivan, Ph.D., editor)
Out of all the issues in the essentialist/social constructionist
debate, whether or not same gender or bisexual sexual
orientation is a choice is probably the sole interest of many
individuals and groups. It is one of the most fiercely debated
issues among scholars, scientists, and the lay public. It is also
debated by some members of gay, lesbian, and bisexual
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communities. Essentialists assume that no sexual orientation,
whether same-gender, bisexual, or heterosexual, is a conscious
choice. (Gonsiorek and Weinrich, 1991; Herdt, 1990) Instead, a
fixed, independent biological mechanism steers individual
desire or behavior either toward men or toward women
irrespective of circumstances and experience. (De Cecco and
Elia, 1993, p. 11). In distinct contrast to this view is the claim
that one’s sexual orientation is chosen or constructed. This is
one of the most basic tenets of social constructionism. (Golden,
1987; Hart and Richardson, 1981; Longino, 1988; Vance, 1988;
Weeks, 1991; Weinberg and Willliams, 1974) Instead of sexual
orientation, the phrase sexual preference is often used by social
constructionists to indicate that people take an active part in
constructing their sexuality (Weinberg, Williams and Pryor,
1994) or make a conscious, intentional choice of sexual partners
(Baumrind, 1995).
Essentialists often hold to biomedical view of
homosexuality, and use scientific studies to find a cause for
homosexuality. Later on a discussion will look at some of these
scientific studies that are used in an attempt for supporting a
biomedical cause for homosexuality. Within this essentialist
view there are non-relational qualities or properties. One is who
they are and that it is without any relationship to any other
people or objects in the world. Therefore in sexuality,
particularly concerning homosexuality one is born a
homosexual, it is; nature that is causative for homosexuality.
“Essentialist approaches to research on sexual orientation-
whether they be evolutionary approaches or approaches that
rely on hormones, genetics, or brain factors-rest on
assumptions that (a) there are underlying true essences
(homosexuality and heterosexuality), (b) there is discontinuity
between forms (homosexuality and heterosexuality are two
distinct, separate categories, rather than points on a
continuum), and (c) there is constancy of these true essences
over time and across cultures (homosexuality and
heterosexuality have the same form today in American culture
-6-
as they have had for centuries and as they have had in other
cultures today).” (Delamater and Shibley Hyd, Essentialism vs
Social Constructionism in the Study of Human Sexuality, p. 16)
“Essentialism regarded homosexuality as a form of gender
inversion that arose from such presocial forces as genes,
hormones, instincts, or specific kinds of developmental
psychodynamics (Richardson, 1981). In other words, it viewed
same-sex desire and its perceived behavioral pattern of gender
nonconformity as a manifestation of some biological or
psychological inner sense (Greenberg, 1988, p. 485). It regarded
homosexuality as a distinct and separate form of being, with
modes of expression that transcended time and place (Troiden
1988).” (Levine, Gay Macho: The Life and Death of the Homosexual
Clone, p. 233)
“The category of homosexuality carries a definition of the
essential nature of the self. As individuals are inserted into this
discursive framework through the growing authority of
medicine, science, psychiatry, and law, individuals who have
same-sex longings are defined as unique, abnormal human type:
the homosexual.” (Seidman, Embattled Eros, p. 147)
Yet we can find within this philosophical belief system there
is a heterosexist essentialism and a homosexist essentialism.
Those individuals who adhere to heterosexist essentialism
assume an unmitigated dimorphism of sexuality,
hetero/homosexuality. Seeing the complementary dualities of
human existence, the heterosexist essentialist is implying that
homosexuality is an immature or inferior developmental track.
The individual that adheres to a homosexual essentialism would
impose a gay or lesbian identity on those individuals who
experience same-sex attractions, and encourage the acceptance
of a gay identity. Coming out, is a concept that encourages
individuals to celebrate their homosexuality. In doing so,
homosexual essentialists are implying that a person was always
essentially homosexual in orientation but has only now become
ready and willing to acknowledge their true sexual nature and
identity.
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Those who hold to this homosexist essentialism may have
two variants to support their views, an identitarian or
behavioral essentialism.
“But essentialism as an intellectual program in lesbian and
gay studies has two variants. The first one to develop was
essentialism as a metaphysical or universal category of sexual
identity, which might be called identitarian essentialism. The
second variant to emerge focused on the biological explanation
of sexual orientation and interpreted it as a naturalized category
of behavior; this is behavorial essentialism.” (Eschoffier,
American Homo: Community and Perversity, p. 130)
The identitarian essentialist looks back into history and sees
those who commit homosexual behavior as being a homosexual
or gay. The behavorial essentialist looks to homosexual
behavior in other species for supporting the view that humans
are born homosexual.
This idea of a gay identity is relatively new, becoming
popularized only since the late 1960’s and early 1970’s in the
United States and Western Europe. So, it may be viewed, as a
type of homosexuality and it will be discussed in further depth
later. Unfortunately, authors now sometimes use a homosexual
and a gay/lesbian identity interchangeably. Also, there is some
possibility of confusion when authors write about sexual
orientation and sexual preference. So often when writing about
homosexuality there is a confusing use of terms,
homosexuality/gay and lesbian identity, sexual
orientation/sexual preference. Also, some authors want to
speak of an erotic orientation instead of sexual orientation. An
essentialist and a social constructionist may have varying
definitions for the same word or idea. Then there are those who
hold to an interactionist view of homosexuality. That is, they
would say we should have a combination of essentialistism and
social constructionism ideas. Their defining of terms need to be
understood in this context also.
“Interestingly, the term essentialism is generally used by
those who are oppose to it and not those who practice it.”
-8-
(Delamater and Shibley Hyde, Essentialism vs Social
Constructionism in the Study of Human Sexuality, p. 11)
“The crises have arisen in deciding what is essential to the
homosexual category: Is it a particular pattern of sexual
behavior? Is it a particular sexual identity? Is it an underlying
orientation?” (Richardson, The Dilemma of Essentiality in
Homosexual Theory, p. 89 in Bisexual and Homosexual Identities:
Critical Theoretical Issues, John P. De Cecco, Ph.D. and Michael
G. Shively, M.A., editors)
“Individual erotic preferences are certainly not created
solely by the social structural arrangements. But the integration
of these preferences into a system of personal values, motives,
and self-image very much depends on historical conditions. To
define the traits of the homosexual personality outside the
concrete socionormative milieu is impossible.” (Kon, A
Socicultural Approach in Theories of Human Sexuality, James H. Geer
and William T. O. Donohue, editors, p. 279-280)
The essentialism view of homosexuality may be traced to
the late nineteenth century and to Karl Ulrichs who lived in
what is present day Germany. Ulrichs was a homosexual
himself, and was the first person to theorize about the concept
of a homosexual being a third sex. He was advocating for legal
and social rights for homosexuals.
“Ulrich’s goal was to free people like himself from the legal,
religious, and social condemnation of homosexual acts as
unnatural. For this, he invented a new terminology that would
refer to the nature of the individual, and not to the acts
performed.” (Kennedy, Karl Heinrichs Ulrichs in Rosario,
Science and Homosexualities, p. 30)
The social constructionist view may be traced to the 1970s,
being advocating for by homosexuals in England and the
United States. This was the beginning of the era, which has now
been termed, gay liberation.
“The constructionist perspective began to generate
theoretical writing beginning in the 1970s. British historical
sociologist Jeffrey Weeks, influenced by the earlier work of
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Mary McIntosh, appropriated and reworked the sociological
theories known as symbolic interactionism or labeling theory to
underpin his account of emergence of a homosexual identity in
Western societies during the nineteenth century. Other British
writers associated with the Gay Left Collective produced work
from within this same field of influence. U.S. historians
Jonathan Ned Katz and John D Eimilio, influenced primarily
by feminist theory and the work of Marxists such as E.P.
Thompson, began to produce social construction theories of
homosexuality by the early 1980s.” (Duggan, Making It Perfectly
Clear, p. 116 in Sex Wars, edited by Duggan and Hunter)
“The constructionist perspective transformed social science
thinking about human sexuality (Gagnon and Simon, 1973). It
challenged us to see the conceptual categories through which
individuals interpret eroticism are not, as previously thought, as
biologically or psychologically determined but socially
constituted (Simon and Gagnon, 1987). Culture, that is,
provided the conceptual meanings through which people
distinguished sexual feelings, identities, and practices. It thus
effectively claimed that these definitions were culturally relative
(Plummer, 1975).” (Levine, Gay Macho: The Life and Death of the
Homosexual Clone, p. 233)
The philosophical social constructionist view of sexuality is
based upon behaviors and attitudes. An individual’s sexual
identity, reaching even as far as the preferred object of erotic
attraction, is socially created, bestowed, and maintained. One is
heterosexual because their sexual attitudes and behaviors are
toward members of the opposite sex. For the homosexual,
these sexual attitudes and behaviors would be for members of
the same sex. Therefore, social constructionists would suggest
there is nothing “real” about sexual orientation, except for a
society’s construction.
“According to this view, sexual roles and behaviors arise out
of a culture’s religious, moral, and ethical beliefs, its legal
traditions, politics, aesthetics, whatever scientific or traditional
views biology and psychology it may have, even factors like
- 10 -
geography and climate. The constructionist view holds that
sexual roles vary from one civilization to another because there
are no innately predetermined scripts for human sexuality.”
(Mondimore, A Natural History of Homosexuality, p. 19)
“Homosexuality has everywhere existed, but it is only in
some cultures that it has become structured into a sub-culture.
Homosexuality in the pre-modern period was frequent, but
only in certain closed communities was it ever institutionalized -
perhaps in some monasteries and nunneries, as many of the
medieval penitentials suggest; in some of the knightly orders
(including the Knights Templars), as the great medieval
scandals hint; and in the courts of certain monarchs (such as
James I of England, William III). Other homosexual contacts,
though recurrent, are likely to have been casual, fleeting, and
undefined.” (Weeks, Coming Out, p. 35)
“Conversely, constructionism interpreted homosexuality as
a conceptual category that varied between cultural and historical
settings (Troiden 1988). Definitions of same-sex eroticism were
viewed as cultural inventions that were specific to particular
societies at particular times. It also held that conceptualizations
of homosexuality determined the forms same-sex eroticism
took within a given society (Greenberg 1988). In other words,
the social meaning of homosexuality shaped the domain of
emotions, identity, and conduct associated with sex between
men.” (Levine, Gay Macho: The Life and Death of the Homosexual
Clone, p. 233-234)
Thus, not surprisingly, they would reject the possibility of
biomedical factors, i.e. nature, being involved with sexual
orientation. One cannot be born a homosexual. It is nurture
which plays the role in creating homosexuality. A social
constructionist view of homosexuality is not objective; it has
relationship qualities and properties that are culturally defined
and dependent.
“Transcending all these issues of lifestyle was the potent
question of the gay identity itself. The gay identity is no more a
product of nature than any other sexual identity. It has
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developed through a complex history of definitions and self-
definition, and what recent histories of homosexuality have
clearly revealed is that there is no necessary connection between
sexual practices and sexual identity.” (Weeks, Sexuality and Its
Discontents: Meanings, Myths and Modern Sexualities, p. 50)
“We tend to think now that the word homosexual has an
unvarying meaning, beyond time and history. In fact it is itself a
product of history, a cultural artifact designed to express a
particular concept.” (Weeks, Coming Out, p. 3)
“In sum, homosexuality is not one but many things, many
psychosocial forms, which can be viewed as symbolic
mediations between psychocultural and historical conditions
and human potentials for sexual response across life course.”
(Herdt, Cross-Cultural Issues in the Development of Bisexuality and
Homosexuality, p. 55)
Gilbert Herdt is an anthropologist, who self-identifies as a
gay male. He has written many books advocating for
homosexuality and I will be repeatedly quoting from his
writings. Herdt is best known for his work among the Sambia
people of the eastern highlands of New Guinea. He could be
considered to hold to a social constructionism view of
homosexuality. The following quote taken from the
introduction of his book, Same Sex, Different that was
published in 1997, is very interesting.
“Living among the Sambia and understanding their culture
thus came to shape and influence my own sexuality and the
sense which I defined myself as being gay and in a partnership
for life with another man in my own society. Just as one might
expect, it was very important to my Sambia friends not only
that I was interested in their customs and could be trusted to
keep the secrets of the initiation rituals from the women and
children, but also that I was curious and comfortable about
their homoerotic relations. I understood their feelings well
enough. And I was sensitive enough to inquire about issues of
sexual attraction and excitement that another person in my

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position might have found offensive or repulsive if he lacked
the experience or curiosity to go on.
But equally true, as the years went by, the Sambia could not
understand my own sexuality, and even my closest friends, such
as Weiyu and Moondi, would implore me to consider getting
married and having children. They even tried to arrange a
marriage for me with a Sambia woman, and on more than one
occasion, because they felt sorry for me! More than once I can
remember Moondi asking about my relationship with my friend
(partner) in the United States; and I would even use the word
gay to refer to this relationship, but Moondi was unable to
understand what this meant to me. I had reached the limits of
cross-cultural understanding even among the people closest to
me in the Sambia culture. Their society did not have a concept
for homosexual or gay, and these notions, when I translated
them in the appropriate way, were alien and unmanageable.
Thus, it is remarkable for me to think that, even though
living with the Sambia enabled me to accept in a way perhaps
strange to the United States concept of same-sex relations as
normal and natural, the Sambia in their own way could only
regard my own culture’s identity constructs of homosexual and
gay as strange. Herein lies a powerful lesson about cross-
cultural study of homosexuality-and a warning about the
importance of being careful in the statements and assumptions
we make about another people, as well as the need to respect
their own customs for what they are – and are not.” (Herdt,
Same Sex, Different Cultures, p. xiv-xv)
Even though writing this, Herdt and many others continue
to try to use the Sambia cultural homosexuality as a type of age-
structured homosexuality to support the post-modern western
concept of homosexuality, a gay identity.
Those advocating for a homosexual identity have not
resolved this philosophical tug of war of conflicting ideologies,
essentialism versus social constructionism. In fact, the strongest
criticisms between these two views have been among
homosexuals themselves. There is a logical explanation for this
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philosophical ideological tug of war. Both sides ask different
questions, find different answers, and therefore this
philosophical tug of war will have no winner.
“Social constructionism does not offer alternative answers
to questions posed by essentialism: it raises a wholly different
set of questions. Instead of searching for truths about
homosexuals and lesbians, it asks about the discursive practices,
the narrative forms, within which homosexuals and lesbians are
produced and reproduced. In its opposition to, and
deconstruction of, both homosexuals and science itself, it can
never be rendered compatible with the essentialist project.”
(Kitzinge, Social Constructionism: Implications for Gay and Lesbian
Psychology, p. 150 in Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Identities over the
Lifespan: Psychological Perspectives, D. Augelli and Patterson)
“The social constructionist/essentialist debate is ultimately
irresolvable, because these two positions are not
commensurate. Social constructistism and essentialistism not
only offer different answers, but also ask different questions
and rely on different approaches to finding the answers,
(empiricism versus rhetoric).” (Kitzinge, Social Constructionism:
Implications for gay Lesbian Psychology, p. 156 in Lesbian, Gay, and
Bisexual Identities over the Lifespan: Psychological Perspectives, D.
Augelli and Patterson)
Both essentialism and social construct views of
homosexuality have their limitations. Science or medical
theories have never been proven. A discussion will follow
looking at some of these scientific studies. Likewise, the social
construct view has serious shortcomings.
“The social-constructionist theory of homosexual identity
has its own weaknesses, however. According to some evidence,
sexual behavior is a continuum and varies over the life cycle.
This evidence brings into doubt the fixedness or stability of
people’s sexual identities.” (Escoffier, American Homo: Community
and Perversity, p. 129)
“To escape the stranglehold that social constructionism has
placed on the field of sexuality, we must understand the
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strengths and weaknesses of the theory. First, the theory is a
strategy for critical analysis; it is not a scientific theory. In fact,
social constructionism makes a poor theory. The goal of
constructionists is to point out how information and concepts
within social discourse support various social groups and
particular versions of social reality. They cannot say what reality
should be. Social constructionism is a relativist philosophy that
holds that social narratives about reality have value to the
people invested in them; beliefs have no objective value. For
social constructionists, social beliefs that gay people are demon-
possessed and should have holes drilled into their heads in
order to release the evil spirits that reside therein is as valid an
explanation as believing that there is a gay gene. The
sociopolitical climate determines what beliefs are valued. When
these beliefs are identified, constructionism can be used to
facilitate social change, if change is desired.” (Kauth, True
Nature A Theory of Sexual attraction, p. 105)
Kauth is his book goes on to write about the limits of social
construction. His first limit placed on a social construction view
is as follows.
“Feminists, gay/lesbian theorists, social activists, and others
who feel marginalized by society make up the largest group of
adherents to social constructionism. For these followers, social
constructionism represents a tool for social liberation.” (Kauth,
True Nature: A Theory of Sexual Attraction, p. 105)
He also writes that a social constructionist base their
condemnation of essentialism on the single-factor biomedical
theories of same sex eroticism. While at the same time they
hold to their own single-factor social labeling theory of
homosexuality. A third limit he says is of a failure of any
discussion of bisexuality. But at the same time promoting the
idea that the absence of sexual categories will result in diverse
sexual relationships. Kauth’s fourth limitation of a social
construction is that it expresses a disembodied, purely social
view of human beings. In regards to sexuality they want to
discuss the social impact, and not the influence upon people as
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well as all animals the similar biological and instinctual forces to
survive and reproduce. Delmater and Hyde in their article,
Essentialism vs Social Constructionism in the Study of Human
Sexuality write of two more weaknesses. In social
constructionism there is a tendency to assign a passive role to
the individual. More puzzling is the limited explanatory and
predictive power of constructionists theories, given their
emphasis on variability.
“In brief, although social constructionists are very good at
poking holes in conventional thinking, the theory offers little in
the way of a useful conceptualization for the development of
sexual attraction. The theory just does not match recorded
experience and observations across cultures, and its predictions
fall short.” (Kauth, True Nature: A Theory of Sexual Attraction, p.
108)
Perhaps as many people have theorize, including Kauth, an
interactionist model for homosexuality may be the best logical
and practical outcome for the understanding homosexuality.
“A common assumption of most theories is a multi-
dimensional developmental model with several factors (e.g.,
psychological, biological, and sociological ) interacting with in a
complex manner to determine homosexuality (Marmor, 1965).”
(Martin, Early Sexual Behavior in Adult Homosexual and
Heterosexual Males, p. 396)
“The literature on sexual orientation is replete with theories
about the causes of homosexuality. While it is beyond the scope
of this article to discuss each of those theories, individually. It
should be noted that almost all of the theories of homosexual
are predicated on the same basic assumption. Most theories
presume that homosexuality is caused by abnormalities in
biological, psychological, or social development leading to
sexual inversion-that is, having or desiring to have
characteristics of the opposite sex including sexual attraction to
one’s own sex.” (Storms, A Theory of Erotic Orientation
Development, p. 350)

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“It develops in some individuals as a result of influences of
heredity, prenatal development, childhood experiences, and
cultural milieu in varying combinations. No one influence
seems either necessary or sufficient-homosexual orientation is a
possible outcome in many different circumstances because the
human mind is uniquely evolved to be rich in possibilities.”
(Mondimore, A Natural History of Homosexuality, p. 249)
But after reading and trying to understand what these and
many other authors have written, advocating for homosexuality
I am even more confused about what I read in an article from
The Journal of Sex Research. These authors are writing of
concerns about holding to an interactionist view of
homosexuality.
“In our view, the basic definitions of essentialism and social
constuctionism may well prohibit efforts to frame conjoint
theories. Essentialism relies on a notion of true essences, with
an implication (found in postivism) that we can know these true
essences directly and objectively. Social constructionist argue
the opposite, that we cannot know anything about true essences
or reality directly, but rather that humans always engage in
socially constructing reality. There is no happy detente between
these approaches. Similarly, the essentialist emphasis on
separate and distinct categories or essences is at odds with the
social constructionist view of the startling diversity of human
sexual expression across time and culture, and even within the
individual. Therefore, although one may frame inteactionist or
conjoint theories of biological and cultural influences, it seems
to us unlikely that there can be a true conjoining essentialist and
social constructionist approaches.” (Delamater and Shibley
Hyde, Essentialism vs Social Constructionism in The Study of Human
Sexuality, p. 17)
What are we then left to believe from this philosophical
discussion of conflicting ideologies of the causes of
homosexuality? Although what all these authors have written
may contain truth(s). This is also true, our physical bodies do
respond to many stimuli, including same-sex sexual/erotic
- 17 -
stimuli. Therefore, we cannot leave out a moral aspect to
human sexuality. Sexual promiscuity, usually with anonymous
partners, is often associated with homosexuality. Nor can we
deny there are negative physical consequences, i.e. sexually
transmitted diseases (STDs) that include AIDS. Even those
advocating for homosexuality, must acknowledge these moral
and medical consequences.
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Chapter 2
Biological Basis for Homosexuality

In this discussion of changing the traditional definition of


marriage, that it is the union of one man and one woman, has
been frame in the parameters as a rights issue. The change that
is being advocated for is the gender of one of the partners in
marriage, with the result being same-sex marriage. But it is one
particular group; homosexual advocates who are trying to
change the definition of marriage. So, they attempt to speak of
this change as homosexual marriage. In doing so there is one
question that has yet to be answered. Who is a homosexual?
When this question is answered, it then answers the question
within the discussion of changing the definition of marriage as
it pertains to being a rights issue. If there is no homosexual as a
distinct class of individuals, in essence what is being advocated
for is the legally sanctioning of homosexual behavior.
What follows are quotes to help answer the question. Who
is a homosexual? Many of the books and articles cited below
are by those advocating for homosexuality. First are quotes that
address a biological basis for homosexuality. Then quotes are
given in the parameter of who one is a homosexual or what one
does homosexual behavior. In northern America and Western
Europe homosexuals have chosen the terms gay and lesbian
and there are quotes to help understand this concept of
homosexuals as gay and lesbian. I am challenging the
parameters of the discussion of homosexuality and the defining
of terms within this discussion and I am doing so by using what
homosexual advocates write in their books and articles.
“Of relevance to this collection of papers is the danger of
having the search for scientific facts comprised by the political
ideologies of the investigators. In the case of historical there
have been egregious examples of anachronism in the search for
gay men and lesbians of the past and the attribution of the gay
identity to the biblical David and Naomi, to Julius Caesar and
- 21 -
Alexander the Great, to the temple priests of classical Greece,
and to medieval witches. By taking on the conflated notion of
sexual identity, the biological research, in its search for physical
markers that distinguish heterosexuals from homosexuals, has
unwittingly enlisted itself in the politics of sexual identity.” (De
Cecco and Parker, editors, Sex, Cells, and Same-Sex Desire: The
Biology of Sexual Preference, p. 24)
Biological Causation
“As this survey indicates, research currently cited in support
of a biological model of human sexuality is methodologically
deficient, inclusive, or open to contradictory theoretical
interpretations. In addition, much of such research concentrates
on animal studies and therefore has little relationship to human
behavior which is generally affected by cultural values.
Therefore, this paper basic question is: How convincing is the
biological evidence that details of human sexuality are directly
due to innate traits and processes? The answer is the evidence is
far from persuasive. We may conclude that the biological
perspective on human sexuality has not yet made a substantial
contribution to the balanced biosocial synthesis that the
Baldwins (1980) have recommended This conclusion is not
intended to imply that biology has nothing to do with human
sexuality (since the two, are of course, inextricably intertwined).
It means simply this: The claim that biological factors have an
immediate, direct influence on such things as sexual identity,
behavior, or orientation remains unproven. When biology
seems to be critical in such matters, an intervening cultural
factor is often more immediate.” (De Cecco and Shively,
Bisexual and Homosexual Identities: Critical Theoretical Issues, p. 150-
151)
“As this collection of papers has shown, the search for
purely biological determines of sexual preference is fraught with
short-comings. It conflates biological sex with gender and
gender with sexuality, it reduces a given sexual preference to
specific behaviors and further reduces those behaviors to
biological processes, and it accepts and reinforces society’s
- 22 -
whimsical moral judgments, categories, and proscriptions
regarding sexuality. It is no wonder, then, that in spite of the
zeal shown by researchers and the availability of sophisticated
equipment and methodology over the past decade, the search
for biological markers of sexual preference has failed to
produce any conclusive evidence. (Parker and De Cecco, Sexual
Expression: A Global Perspective, p. 427-428 in Sex, Cells, and Same-
Sex Desire, edited by De Cecco and Parker)
“Most researchers, however, acknowledge that biology does
not completely account for homosexuality and that society and
environment also contribute to gay and lesbian identities. In
addition, because research on homosexuality does not occur in
isolation, but rather in a cultural and historical context, it is
subject to manipulation by persons with moral and political
agendas. Critics have responded to this possible abuse of both
science and subjects in two ways. They either conclude that any
scientific investigation is comprised by the scientist’s subjective
bias, or they assert that in the rigorous scrutiny of scientific
methodologies will prevent unreasonable bias.” (Murphy,
Reader’s Guide to Lesbian and Gay Studies, p. 84-85)
“It remains difficult, on scientific grounds, to avoid the
conclusion that the uniquely human phenomenon of sexual
orientation is a consequence of a multifactorial developmental
process in which biological factors play a part, but in which
psychosocial factors remain crucially important. If so, the moral
and political issues must be resolved on other grounds.”
(Bancroft, Homosexual Orientation The Search for a biological basis, p.
439)
“The argument for homosexual immutability betrays a
misreading of the scientific research itself. Nothing in any of
these studies can fully support the idea that homosexuality is
biologically immutable; each study leaves open the possibility
that homosexuality is the result of a combination of biological
and environmental factors, and several suggest that
homosexuality may be tied to a predisposition in temperament
that could manifest itself in a number of ways. All, agree that
- 23 -
biological, social, and psychological factors interact to produce
and change the signs of homosexuality. Furthermore, these
studies cannot comment effectively on the frequency of
homosexuality in the general population.” (Terry, An American
Obsession, p. 394)
“Biologic theories can account for the feelings that motivate
behaviors; the behaviors themselves will be strongly determined
by the environmental factors-in the case of sexual orientation
such factors as available opportunities and social and legal
sanctions.” (McConaghy, Biologic Theories of Sexual Orientation, p.
431)
Who one is: a homosexual
“We tend to think now that the word homosexual has an
unvarying meaning, beyond time and history. In fact it is itself a
product of history, a cultural artifact designed to express a
particular concept.” (Weeks, Coming Out, p. 3)
“While homosexual behavior can be found in all societies,
though with very different cultural meanings, the emergence of
the homosexual as a cultural construct can be traced to the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth century in urban centers of
north-west Europe (Trumnach 1989a, 1989b) and also linked
with the rise of capitalism (D’Emilio 1983). Medical and
psychiatric discourses provided the concept and labels of
homosexuality and inversion from the 1860s, ...” (Ballard,
Sexuality and the State in Time of Epidemic, p. 108 in Rethinking Sex:
Social Theory and Sexuality, research editors R. W. Connell and G.
W. Dowsett)
“For well over a century homosexualists have dreamed that
the invention of the homosexual as a person would ultimately
detoxicate homosexual behavior and win a place of equality
alongside heterosexual behavior.” (De Cecco, Confusing the Actor
With the Act: Muddled Notions About Homosexuality, p. 411)
“Historians underscore an important distinction between
homosexual behavior and homosexual identity. The former is
said to be universal, whereas the later, is viewed as historically
unique. Indeed, some historians hold that a homosexual identity
- 24 -
is a product of the social developments of the late nineteenth-
century Europe and the United States. In any event, it seems
fair to say that a unique construction of identity crystallized
around same-sex desire between 1880 and 1920 in America.
The modern western concept of the homosexual is,
according to some historians, primarily a creation of late
nineteenth-century medical-science discourses. In the context
of elaborating systems of classification and descriptions of
different sexualities, as part of a quest to uncover the truth
about human nature, the homosexual is said to have stepped
forward as a distinct human type with his/her own mental and
physical nature.” (Seidman, Embattled Eros: Sexual Politics and
Ethics in Contemporary America, p. 146)
“Psychological theory, which should be employed to
describe only individual mental, emotional, and behavioral
aspects of homosexuality, has been employed for building
models of personal development that purport to mark the steps
in an individual’s progression toward a mature and egosyntonic
gay or lesbian identity. The embracing and disclosing of such an
identity, however, is best understood as a political phenomenon
occurring in a historical period during which identity politics
has become a become a consuming occupation.” (De Cecco
and Parker, The Biology of Homosexuality: Sexual Orientation or
Sexual Preference, p. 20 in Sex, Cells, and Same-Sex Desire: The
Biology of Sexual, Preference, editors De Cecco and Parker)
Who one is: homosexual as gay and lesbian
“Lesbian and gay historians have asked questions about the
origins of gay liberation and lesbian feminism, and have come
up with some surprising answers. Rather than finding a silent,
oppressed, gay minority in all times and all places, historians
have discovered that gay identity is a recent, Western, historical
construction. Jeffrey Weeks, Jonathan Katz and Lillian
Faderman, for example have traced the emergence of lesbian
and gay identity in the late nineteenth century. Similarly, John D
Emilio, Allan Berube and the Buffalo Oral History Project have

- 25 -
described how this identity laid the basis for organized political
activity in the years following World War II.
The work of lesbian and gay historians has also
demonstrated that human sexuality is not a natural, timeless
given, but is historically shaped and politically regulated.”
(Duggan and Hunter, Sex Wars, p. 151-152)
“The idea of a gay and lesbian identity sexual identity has
been formulated over the last two decades. Historically it is the
product of the gay and lesbian liberation movement, which,
itself, grew out of the Black civil rights and women’s liberation
movements of the fifties and sixties. Like ethnic identities,
sexual identity assigns individuals to membership in a group,
the gay lesbian community. Although sexual identity has
become a group identity, its historical antecedents can be traced
to the nineteen-century notion that homosexual men and
women, each a representative of a newly discovered biological
specimen, represented a third sex. Homosexuality, which had
been conceived primarily as an act was thereby transformed
into an actor (De Cecco, 1990b). Once actors had been created
it was possible to assign them a group identity. Once a person
became a member of a group, particularly one that has been
stigmatized and marginal, identity as an individual was easily
subsumed under group identity.” (De Cecco and Parker, The
Biology of Homosexuality: Sexual Orientation or Sexual Preference, p.
22-23 in Sex, Cells, and Same-Sex Desire: The Biology of Sexual,
Preference, editors De Cecco and Parker)
“It isn’t at all obvious why a gay rights movement should
ever have arisen in the United States in the first place. And it’s
profoundly puzzling why that movement should have become
far and away the most powerful such political formation in the
world. Same gender sexual acts have been commonplace
throughout history and across cultures. Today, to speak with
surety about a matter for which there is absolutely no statistical
evidence, more adolescent male butts are being penetrated in
the Arab world, Latin American, North Africa and Southeast
Asia then in the west.
- 26 -
But the notion of a gay identity rarely accompanies such
sexual acts, nor do political movements arise to make demands
in the name of that identity. It’s still almost entirely in the
Western world that the genders of one’s partner is considered a
prime marker of personality and among Western nations it is
the United States – a country otherwise considered a bastion of
conservatism – that the strongest political movement has arisen
centered around that identity.
We’ve only begun to analyze why, and to date can say little
more then, that certain significant pre-requisites developed in
this country, and to some degree everywhere in the western
world, that weren’t present, or hadn’t achieved the necessary
critical mass, elsewhere. Among such factors were the
weakening of the traditional religious link between sexuality and
procreation (one which had made non-procreative same gender
desire an automatic candidate for denunciation as unnatural).
Secondly the rapid urbanization and industrialization of the
United States, and the West in general, in the nineteen-century
weakened the material (and moral) authority of the nuclear
family, and allowed mavericks to escape into welcome
anonymity of city life, where they could choose a previously
unacceptable lifestyle of singleness and nonconformity without
constantly worrying about parental or village busybodies
pouncing on them.” (Duberman, Left Out, p. 414-415)
What one does: homosexuality/homosexual behavior
“Our concepts and categories of sexual expression are
based on the genders of the two partners involved:
heterosexuality when the partners are of the opposite sex, and
homosexuality when the partners are of the same sex. In other
times and among other peoples, this way of thinking about
people simply doesn’t seem to apply-anthropologists, historians,
sociologists have described many cultures in which same-sex
eroticism occupies a very different place than it does in our
own. ... Just as the Greeks and Romans had no words for our
sexual categories, the Native American societies described by
explorers, missionaries, and anthropologists from the
- 27 -
seventeenth onward had sexual categories for which we have
no words.
Consequently, in the sections that follow- an exploration of
attitudes and customs of ancient peoples toward same-sex
eroticism – the modern concepts of homosexuality or sexual
orientation will be conspicuous by their absence. Within these
cultures, sexual contact between persons of the same sex is not
necessarily seen as characteristic of a particular group or subset
of persons, there is no category for homosexuals. On the
contrary, in some cultures, same-sex eroticism was an expected
part of the sexual experience of every member of society, which
would seem to argue against the existence of homosexuality as a
personal attribute at all.” (Mondimore, A Natural History of
Homosexuality, p. 3-4)
“A second assumption is that homosexuality is a unitary
construct that is culturally transcendent. However, a wealth of
cross-cultural evidence points to the existence of numerous
patterns of homosexuality varying in origins, subjective states,
and manifest behaviors. In fact, the pattern of essentially
exclusive male homosexuality familiar to us has been
exceedingly rare or unknown in cultures that required or
expected all males to engage in homosexual activity.” (Byrne
and Parsons, Human Sexual Orientation, p. 228)
“The presently dominant myth implies that
“homosexuality” is a uniform category, that the history, the
experience, the self-understanding of those whose love is
directed to members of the same gender can be subsumed
within the same definition, the same explanatory paradigm.
Whereas in actuality, as many recent studies have
acknowledged, even as they still use the word, we would do
better to speak in the plural, to speak of homosexualities.”
(Downing, Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love, p. 6-7)
“In sum, homosexuality is not one but many things, many
psychosocial forms, which can be viewed as symbolic
mediations between psychocultural and historical conditions
and human potentials for sexual response across life course.”
- 28 -
(Herdt, Cross-Cultural Issues in the Development of Bisexuality and
Homosexuality, p. 55)
My interest in the discussion of homosexuality is a personal
one. Up until ten years ago, I believed I was a homosexual.
What was most instrumental in my overcoming homosexuality
was when I understand the idea that it was not who one is a
homosexual but what one did homosexual behavior. When I
understood this, and was able to separate the behavior from the
person, it empowered me to accept personal responsibility for
attitudes and acts. It also gave me hope to look forward to the
day when my life would not be ruled and led by my feelings and
emotions, which can change from moment to moment and day
to day, often influenced by external circumstances. I also have
to accept the reality that my body will respond to same-sex
sexual stimuli. But the question is not can I; but should I allow
it to repeatedly do so. In essence seeking same-sex intimacy
with others of the same-sex in sexual acts is an illegitimate way
of meeting the legitimate need for same-sex intimacy. I am
lobbying to maintain the status quo that marriage be defined as
the union between one man and one woman. In doing so I
understand to change the gender of one of the partners will
only lead to further changes as in the number of partners, age
of partners etc. I am not lobbying against individuals but how
individuals wish to define themselves by the attitudes and acts
they commit. Because I along with thousands of others have
changed how we once defined ourselves in similar ways. Also I
lobby understanding this is not an issues of rights but one of
legally sanctioning homosexual behavior. With the end result
being the continuation of the normalization and legitimatization
of homosexuality.
Bibliography
Bancroft, John. Homosexual Orientation The search for a biological
basis. British Journal Of Psychiatry. 1994, p. 164, 437-440.
Byne, William, M.D., Ph.D. and Bruce Parsons, M.D.,
Ph.D. Human Sexual Orientation The Biological Theories Reappraised.
Archives of General Psychiatry. Vol. 50, March 1993, p. 228-239.
- 29 -
Connell, R. W. and G. W. Dowsett. Rethinking Sex Social
Theory and Sexuality Research. Melbourne University Press.
Melbourne, 1992.
De Cecco, John P. Confusing the Actor With the Act: Muddled
Notions About Homosexuality. Archives of Sexual Behavior. 1990.
Vol. 19, No. 4, p. 409-412.
De Cecco, John P., Ph.D. and Michael G. Shively, M.A.,
editors. Bisexual and Homosexual Identities: Critical Theoretical Issues.
The Haworth Press. New York, 1984.
De Cecco, John P., Ph.D. and David Allen Parker, M.A.,
editors. Sex, Cells, and Same-Sex Desire: The Biology of Sexual
Preference. Harrington Park Press, New York.
Downing, Christine. Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love.
Continuum Publishing Company. New York, 1989.
Duberman, Martin. Left Out. South End Press. Cambridge,
MA, 2002.
Duggan, Lisa and Nan D. Hunter. Sex Wars Sexual Dissent
and Political Culture. Routledge. New York & London, 1995.
Herdt, Gilbert. Same Sex, Different Cultures. Westview Press.
1997.
McConaghy, D.Sc., M.D., Nathaniel. Biologic Theories of
Sexual Orientation. Archives of General Psychiatry May. 1994,
Volume 51, p. 431-431.
Mondimore, Francis Mark. A Natural History of
Homosexuality. The John Hopkins University Press. Baltimore
and London, 1996.
Murphy, Timothy F. Readers Guide to Lesbian and Gay Studies.
Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers. Chicago & London, 2000.
Seidman, Steven. Embattled Eros. Routledge. New York,
1992.
Terry, Jennifer. An American Obession Science, Medicine, and
Homosexuality in Modern Society. The University of Chicago Press.
Chicago and London, 1999.
Weeks, Jeffrey. Coming Out Homosexual Politics in Britain, from
the Nineteenth Century to the Present. Quartet Books. London,
Melbourne & New York, 1977.
- 30 -
Chapter 3
Gay Brains and Gay Genes

Those advocating for homosexuality often misused the


small number of studies that have been conducted which have
shown a possible biological basis for homosexuality. This
misuse actually began with the researchers themselves. The
misuse is often with the intention of achieving a political
objective. After having their research results published in the
highly-respected journal, Science, both LeVay and Hamer went
on to write books. The use and misuse of this research for a
biological basis for homosexuality has come with mixed results.
In finding a homosexual person it is hoped that the treatment
of such individuals by others will be more favorable, and even
gaining specific legal rights for homosexuals. Yet there is also
the risk for greater unfavorable treatment, with possible
attempts for the prevention of becoming a homosexual. The
search for a biological basis to homosexuality first began in
Germany during the 1860s.
“For well over a century homosexualists have dreamed that
the invention of the homosexual as a person would ultimately
detoxicate homosexual behavior and win it a place of equality
alongside heterosexual behavior.” (De Cecco, Confusing the Actor
With the Act: Muddled Notions About Homosexuality, p. 411)
“The biological claims of gay brains and genes, while
power-charged interventions in the current cultural and political
debates of difference, are by no means historically innovatory,
as social historians of sexuality have long recognized (Weeks
1981). The claims instead resurrect the essentialist thesis
advanced by politically engaged gay men and argued
intermittently since the mid-nineteenth century to secure
political and culture space for homosexuality. In a context of
widespread political moves within the U.S. to deny
homosexuals their constitutional rights, this oppositional
discourse, with its twin location in the neurosciences and in
- 31 -
molecular genetics, seeks to ground the claim for civil rights in
the body.” (Rose, Gay Brains, Gay Genes and Feminist Science
Theory in Weeks and Holland, editors, Sexual Cultures
Communities, Values, and Intimacy, p. 54)
“As this collection of papers has shown, the search for
purely biological determines of sexual preference is fraught with
short-comings. It conflates biological sex with gender and
gender with sexuality, it reduces a given sexual preference to
specific behaviors and further reduces those behaviors to
biological processes, and it accepts and reinforces society’s
whimsical moral judgments, categories, and proscriptions
regarding sexuality. It is no wonder, then, that in spite of the
zeal shown by researchers and the availability of sophisticated
equipment and methodology over the past decade, the search
for biological markers of sexual preference has failed to
produce any conclusive evidence.” (Parker and De Cecco,
Sexual Expression: A Global Perspective, p. 427-428 in Sex, Cells,
and Same-Sex Desire, edited by De Cecco and Parker)
As noted before the biological basis for homosexuality may
be historically traced to the 19th century in Germany when
homosexuals themselves begin advocating for legal rights. Up
until this time homosexuality was as seen what one did, and it
was a sin and a crime. Now it would also begin to have a
medical and scientific connotation, there could now be a
homosexual person. Yet in over 130 years there has not been
found one homosexual person. Today many of those who
practice homosexuality self-identify as homosexuals and have
created and organized based these sexual acts.
“The modern western concept of the homosexual is,
according to some historians, primarily a creation of late
nineteenth-century medical-science discourses. In the context
of elaborating systems of classification and descriptions of
different sexualities, as part of a quest to uncover the truth
about human nature, the homosexual is said to have stepped
forward as a distinct human type with his/her own mental and
physical nature.” (Seidman, Embattled Eros, p. 146)
- 32 -
“The second and related assumption of these research
reports was that homosexuality, as a biological given, existed as
the antithesis of heterosexuality. Over the past two decades,
however, gay and lesbian scholarship has documented the fact
that the notion that individuals exist as two distinct species, one
exclusively heterosexual, the other exclusively homosexual, is of
fairly recent origin, born in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries and institutionalized in 19th century medicine
(Foucault, 1976; Weeks 1991; Trumbach, 1991). In several
historical periods and in many cultures, past and present, no
such antithesis has existed. Almost anyone who engaged in
homosexual practice was believed to be capable also of
heterosexual practice. Nor was it thought that homosexual
practice, especially in youth, in any way precluded adult
heterosexuality (e.g., Dover, 1978; Herdt, 1981; Blackwood,
1985).” (De Cecco and Parker, The Biology of Homosexuality:
Sexual Orientation or Sexual Preference?, p. 11 in Sex, Cells, and
Same-Sex Desire: The Biology of Sexual Preference, edited by John P.
De Cecco, Ph.D. and David Allen Parker, M.A.)
Modern medicine and science has only added to the
confusion. The discussion of homosexuality continues to be
comprised of a seemingly endless philosophical battle between
conflicting ideologies of essentialism and social
constructionism. The best possible summary of this
philosophical battle of ideologies may be stated in the following
statements. Who one is, a homosexual, or What one does,
homosexuality. The strongest evidence and support is for
homosexuality, what one does. Those advocating for
homosexuality have created these conflicting ideologies of
essentialism and social constructionism.
“The category of homosexuality carries a definition of the
essential nature itself. As individuals are inserted into this
discursive framework through the growing authority of
medicine, science, psychiatry, and law, individuals who have
same-sex longings are defines as unique, abnormal human type:
the homosexual.” (Seidman, Embattled Eros, p. 147)
- 33 -
In the early 1990s a small number of scientific studies
reporting to find a biological basis for a homosexual person
were published. The use of and response to these reports were
a surprise to many people. The essentialism side temporally
began to hold sway over those who hold to social
constructionism. The strongest criticism to these published
studies are among others who also advocate for homosexuality,
but do so from a social constructionism perspective.
“To no small extent, the amplification of the twin gay brains
and gay genes these has produced not simply by media
misrepresenting science – as science commonly claims – but
directly through the language and activities of the scientists
themselves. This process has worked its way through a mixture
of press releases, titles and public comment... But most of all,
neither LeVay nor Hammer reflect on the category homosexual
for both it is fixed as, say, brown eyes. LeVay in particular has a
very simple-minded view of sexuality. Thus, he reflects in
passing that heterosexual copulation is so simple, one hardly
needs brain to do it (LeVay, 1993, p. 47). Thus, it is not the
media which biologises the category but the gay scientist
themselves.” (Rose, Gay Brains, Gay Genes and Feminist Science
Theory in Weeks and Holland, editors, Sexual Cultures
Communities, Values, and Intimacy, p. 62-63)
“The argument for homosexual immutability betrays a
misreading of the scientific research itself. Nothing in any of
these studies can fully support the idea that homosexuality is
biologically immutable; each study leaves open the possibility
that homosexuality is the result of a combination of biological
and environmental factors, and several suggest that
homosexuality may be tied to a predisposition in temperament
that could manifest itself in a number of ways. All, agree that
biological, social, and psychological factors interact to produce
and change the signs of homosexuality. Furthermore, these
studies cannot comment effectively on the frequency of
homosexuality in the general population.” (Terry, An American
Obsession, p. 394)
- 34 -
“In studies like these, a type of circulating reasoning often
follows the delineation of the subject population: scientific
research on homosexuality does not begin with random
populations, but rather with groups of people who are defined
as homosexual to begin with (by themselves, by scientist, or by
both); then, researchers search for a biological (or social)
marker common to the group (whether it be a gene a portion of
the brain, or an overwhelming mother); finally, if such a marker
is found, homosexuality is redefined by the presence of the
marker itself. In a curious way, than, each study can be said to
reinvent its own object.” (Kenen, Who Counts When You’re
Counting Homosexuals? Hormones and Homosexuality in Mid-
Twentieth-Century America, p. 197 in Science and Homosexualities,
edited by Vernon A. Rosario)
“Science cannot yet produce unequivocal answers to many
of the questions that exercise politicians or excite moral debate.
Research points to a manifestations of homosexuality being the
outcome of ongoing interplay between a multiplicity of factors,
some genetic, some environmental, the latter including the
environment of the developing fetus as well as upbringing,
family situation, social and legal climate, and culturally
permitted outlets. It appears likely that the direction of sexual
impulses in some individuals is largely a matter of innate,
biological disposition, whereas in others the kind of sexual
experiences to which they are exposed is more influential.
There appears to be in many contrasting societies a hard core of
homosexuals whose behavior is not altered by even the most
draconian sanctions. The causes may well be different for
homosexuals whose general behavior conforms to what is
expected of their sex than those who do not comply with
gender expectations in either social behavior or heterosexual
performance.” (West, Supposed Origins of Homosexuality and
Implications for Social Control, p. 312 in Sociolegal Control of
Homosexuality A Multi-Nation Comparison, editors West and
Green)

- 35 -
In summary, with the exception of the few clear biological
anomalies that result in cross-gender structural anomalies, it is
impossible to disentangle the biological and psychological
contributions to the behavioral differences that constitute
sexual orientation. As Breedlove (1994) affirmed, biology and
psychology are simply disciplines that offer different means of
describing the same phenomena. (Baumrind, Diana, Commentary
on Sexual Orientation: Research and Social Policy Implications, p. 132)
“Biologic theories can account for the feelings that motivate
behaviors; the behaviors themselves will be strongly determined
by the environmental factors-in the case of sexual orientation
such factors as available opportunities and social and legal
sanctions.” (McConaghy, Biologic Theories of Sexual Orientation, p.
431)
“Certainly, as biological organisms, any and all of our
behaviors must have biological correlates, but that does not
mean that those correlates determine our behavior. In fact one
of the maxims of scientific research is ,correlation is not
causation. We are more then, biological organisms; we are
creatures shaped by experience, emotion, time, and
circumstance, and in turn, we re-shape ourselves for our needs
and our goals. Sexuality can be reduced to neither a purely
biological state nor a purely psychosocial one. Any plausible
explanation of sexual expression would have to include all its
components.” (Parker and De Cecco, Sexual Expression: A
Global Perspective, p. 428 in Sex, Cells, and Same-Sex Desire, edited
by De Cecco and Parker)
“It remains difficult, on scientific grounds, to avoid the
conclusion that the uniquely human phenomenon of sexual
orientation is a consequence of a multifactorial developmental
process in which biological factors play a part, but in which
psychological factors remain crucially important. If so, the
moral and political issues must be resolved on other grounds.”
(Bancroft, Homosexual orientation. The search for a biological basis, p.
439)

- 36 -
In the literature that discusses a biological basis for
homosexuality usually there are three broad categories for those
biological causes of homosexuality, hormonal, within the brain,
and genes. They are then broken down into subcategories with
many more details then what is really needed. In the hormonal
category, they are divided into prenatal, before birth, and
postnatal, after birth. The hormones are usually those that deal
with gender, i.e. they effect masculinity and feminity, or
hormones that interact with sexual functioning. The hormones
are testosterone, estrogen, and LH (luteinizing hormone). In
the brain the area studied is the hypothalamus, and there are
four regions of the anterior hypothalamus which is discussed
(INAH 1, 2, 3, 4). When doing gene studies, they are divided
into two categories, indirect where twins and families are
studied; and direct, where specific genes themselves are studied.
“There are three major types of biological models of same-
gender orientation (Byne and Stein 1997). Formative experience
models assume biology shapes the organizing and interpretation
of life experiences, including sexual desire. Direct effects
models hold that factors like genetic predisposition or prenatal
hormones produce brain circuits determinative of sexual
orientation. And indirect models suggest that biological factors
like temperament, not directly related to sexuality, indirectly
shapes sexual orientation. Direct effect models involving
behavioral genetics, hormonal influences, and regional brain
studies have gained particular prominence in the last decade.
Whatever their intrinsic merits, searches for a biological
bases for homosexuality have been plagued by the difficulty of
finding reliable and valid means to identify clear groups
differentiated by sexual orientation.” (Cohler and Galatzer-
Levy, The Course of Gay and Lesbian Lives: Social and Psychoanalytic
Perspectives, p. 53)
A more detailed look at studies by LeVay, a gay brain, and
Hammer, a gay gene follows. These individuals and their studies
were the ones that seem to generate the most excitement in the
popular press. Upon their release in the journal, Science, they
- 37 -
subsequently became the headlines in the popular media with
the resulting politicizing and propagandizing quickly following.
Who are these scientists, and what are their qualifications, will
tell us much about their intent in publishing their studies. What
is often not discussed is the loss of scientific objectivity with
the use of these studies for a possible biological basis for
homosexuality in attempting to gain popular support and even
political gain for homosexuality.
The two scientists LeVay and Hamer, who conducted these
studies of a gay brain and a gay gene self-identify as a
homosexuals. These two studies have never been replicated,
and subsequent studies have shown results that contradict the
original studies. The popular media has given much more press
to the original gay brain and gay gene studies, but all of the
studies have been reported in scientific literature. Both LeVay
and Hamer conducted their studies in areas that they normally
did not study. They were both acknowledged scientists in their
fields, and their research was conducted at well renowned
facilities, which helped to lend credit ability to their studies.
Both LeVay and Hamer went on to write books after
publishing their research findings advocating biological
causations for homosexuality. With this all said and done,
though LeVay and Hamer were passionate researchers, their
research was less then impartial. LeVay conducted his gay brain
research and study after his male lover died from complications
of AIDS. Hammer after seeing many of his friends dying from
Kaposis sarcoma decided to look into a possible genetic
predisposition for gay men to get this rare and now
predominantly AIDS-related cancer.
“The origins and determinants of sexual orientation, both
heterosexual and homosexual, pose unanswered questions of
genuine scientific interest. But the scientific enquiry they have
engendered reveals a long history of distortion by moral and
political considerations. This is an area, par excellence, where
scientific objectivity has little chance of survival.” (Bankcroft,
Homosexual orientation. The search for a biological basis, p. 437)
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“Under the sort of scientific-technical approach favored by
a Hamer or LeVay, information that does not fit existing
theories and preferred modes of research in effects falls into
limbo; it is made to disappear, as though it had never existed.”
(Clausen, Beyond Gay or Straight, p. 127)
“In studies like these, a type of circulating reasoning often
follows the delinearation of the subject population: scientific
research on homosexuality does not begin with random
populations, but rather with groups of people who are defined
as homosexual to begin with (by themselves, by scientist, or by
both); then, researchers search for a biological (or social)
marker common to the group (whether it be a gene a portion of
the brain, or an overwhelming mother); finally, if such a marker
is found, homosexuality is redefined by the presence of the
marker itself. In a curious way, than each study can be said to
reinvent its own object.” (Kenen, Hormones and Homosexuality in
Mid-Twentieth-Century America, Rosario, Vernon A., editor, Science
and Homosexualities, p. 197)
“To be specific, it is necessary to investigate the biological
research to determine exactly what it has to say about
homosexuality. The studies of LeVay and Hamer, for example,
which are often associated with the biological argument, were
limited in scope and never have been satisfactorily replicated
(Crewdson, 1995). In addition, both studies used only male
subjects; therefore, the data only support the biological
argument as applied to male homosexuals. Finally both LeVay’s
and Hamer’s studies draw on a wide variety of scientific studies
that contain varying theories of male homosexuality, many of
which conceptualize male homosexuality as pathology.”
(Brookey, Reinventing the Male Homosexual: The Rhetoric and Power
of the Gay Gene, p. 7)
LeVay’s “Gay Brain”
Science, one of the leading journals in the scientific field
published in 1991 an article by Simon LeVay, A Difference in
Hypothalamic Structure Between Heterosexual and Homosexual Men.
This is the article and study that became the basis for the gay
- 39 -
brain headlines. But it was not without controversy for both the
journal and its author. LeVay was a neurobiologist who
performed his research at the Salk Institute for Biological
Studies in CA. His previous research had been on a distinctly
different region of the brain known as the visual cortex. LeVay
himself said on a The Phil Donahue show (Genetically Gay: Born
Gay or Become Gay, January 3, 1992), that his study was not
entirely a dispassionate scientific endeavor. He conducted his
research and study after his male lover died from complications
of AIDS. In a sense LeVay was personally outing himself with
the publication of his research and study.
“LeVay simply joined other scientist in the not uncommon
error of overlooking the limitations of his research to push for
an unjustified conclusion. The case is a classic example of the
search for some kind of physical difference to account
biologically for phenomena that results from complex,
multilayered sets of processes clearly influenced if not
structured by macro- and microculture.” (Spanier, Biological
Determinism and Homosexuality, p. 44 in Same-Sex Cultures and
Sexualities: An Anthropological Reader, edited by Jennifer
Robertson.)
“LeVay has said that the motive for his research was to
honor the nature of his relationship with his lover, Richard
Hersey, who died of AIDS.” (Murphy, Gay Science: The Ethics of
Sexual Orientation Research, p. 25)
“I do not fault Simon LeVay for trying to make a
contribution to understanding sexuality and for changing his
life dramatically from quiet scientist to public activist, revealing
his long relationship with a doctor who died in 1990 from
AIDS.” (Spanier, Biological Determinism and Homosexuality, p. 43 in
Same-Sex Cultures and Sexualities: An Anthropological Reader, edited
by Jennifer Robertson)
“The claims were immediately contentious both within and
without science. Despite LeVay’s evident cultural capital which
would make him more publishable than an outsider, it is
questionable whether Science would have published an article
- 40 -
of similar methological vulnerabilty had it focused on anything
less charged than homosexuality. The sample was small, and
AIDS commonly produces severe neurological consequences.
There were no normal controls, and he sought to measure a
brain region whose boundaries are notoriously difficult to
define. His findings have not been replicated.” (Rose, Gay
Brains, Gay Genes and Feminist Science Theory in Weeks and
Holland, editors, Sexual Cultures Communities, Values, and Intimacy,
p. 59)
“Simon LeVay’s research is another useful example of the
dynamic of science and politics, in this case, politics supporting
gay rights. LeVay was a neurobiologist at the Salk Institute in
California (a highly reputable research institute) when he
published an article in Science that put another twist on the
“nature vs. nurture” debate. For at least a hundred years, claims
have been made that homosexuals are biologically different
from heterosexuals, so the claim is not new. What is new is the
context in which the claim is made, a context in which a
combination of gay and lesbian liberation movements and the
AIDS crisis have forced greater acceptance of homosexual
activity to a limited but nonetheless considerable degree. Of
great significance here is the fact that LeVay is an openly gay,
scientist, and that this information was revealed in an issue of
Science subsequent to the article’s publication. (LeVay may well
be the first scientist to be identified as gay in Science
(Barinaga).) Along with many other supporters of gay rights, he
sees the “scientific” evidence of a biological determinant of
gayness as a crucial factor in preventing psychiatrists,
lawmakers, and citizens in general from slipping back into-
believing that homosexuality is a mental illness - or that it is
criminal or immoral.” (Spanier, Biological Determinism and
Homosexuality, p. 36 in Same-Sex Cultures and Sexualities: An
Anthropological Reader, edited by Jennifer Robertson)
“LeVay’s scientific article and comments made in interviews
make it very clear that the framework within which LeVay
conceptualizes the causes of sexual orientation derives from a
- 41 -
belief that specific parts of our brains control our behaviors,
including those related to sex. The reification of complete,
dynamic processes (such as intelligence) and the imputation of
causality to physical parts of the body (such as the cerebral
cortex or sets of genes) are common errors in the long history
of biological determinist claims (Hubbard; Lewontin, Rose and
Kamin). To support such claims, much evidence is ignored,
such as a functioning medical student who has only 10% of his
cerebral cortex (Fausto-Sterling, chap. 2).” (Spanier, Biological
Determinism and Homosexuality, p. 39-40 in Same-Sex Cultures and
Sexualities: An Anthropological Reader, edited by Jennifer
Robertson.)
“LeVay’s study was initially rejected by the in-house
reviewers at Science (LeVay, personal communication).
Although Science rarely allows resubmission of manuscripts, an
exception was made in this case. Because Science refuses to
comment on this exceptional treatment, one can only speculate
as to why their initial decision had been to reject the manuscript
even before sending it out for peer review. Perhaps the reason
for this is that paper did not meet the minimal standards to
which even animal research in this area is held. This paper had a
single author who did all of the tissue processing as well as all
of the anatomical measurements and statistical tests. Even in
animal work, the standard has been that all measurements are
made not only blindly but also by more than one investigator.
Certainly, the editors at Science should have been more
cautious and required that a co-investigator repeat and verify
LeVay’s measurements prior to publication of a study that was
sure to be of great interest to the general public as well as to the
scientific community. While LeVay has stated that there was no
suitable co-investigator in his laboratory at the time he
conducted this study (quoted in Marshall, 1992), there is no lack
of qualified anatomists who would have been (and still would
be) more than willing to check his measurements.” (Byne,
Science and Belief: Psychobiological Research on Sexual Orientation, p.

- 42 -
334 in Sex, Cells and Same-Sex Desire, editors John P. De Cecco,
Ph.D. and Michael G. Shively, M.A.)
“In August of 1991 Science magazine published an article
by LeVay entitled A Difference in Hypothalamic Structure
between Heterosexual and Homosexual Men.” The article
claims that one of four particular groups of cells (called INAH
1, 2, 3, and 4 for the interstitial nuclei of the anterior
hypothalamus) of the brain was twice as large in heterosexual
men as in homosexual men or in women (no sexual orientation
specified). From that observation, LeVay concludes in the high-
lighted abstract that precedes the paper: “This finding indicates
that INAH [3] is dimorphic with sexual orientation, at least in
men, and suggests that sexual orientation has a biological
substrate” (1034).” (Spanier, Biological Determinism and
Homosexuality, p. 37 in Same-Sex Cultures and Sexualities: An
Anthropological Reader, edited by Jennifer Robertson)
LeVay’s research was the study of the brain tissue from 41
subjects that was obtained from routine autopsies of those who
died at 7 metropolitan hospitals in New York and California. 19
of the subjects were homosexual men who died of
complications from AIDS (1 was a bisexual). There were an
additional 16 male subjects which were presumed to be
heterosexual, of these, 6 died from AIDS and 10 from other
causes. The final 6 subjects were women presumed to be
heterosexual, of these 1 died from AIDS and 5 from other
causes. What LeVay did was to measure the size of the INAH3
portion of the hypothalamus. His research and results were
published in the Science article.
“The discovery that a nucleus differs in size between
heterosexual and homosexual men illustrates that sexual
orientation in humans is amenable to study at the biological
level, and this discovery opens the door to the studies of
neurotransmitters or receptors that might be involved in
regulating this aspect of personality. Further interpretation of
the results of this study must be considered speculative. In
particular, the results do not allow one to decide if the size of
- 43 -
INAH 3 in an individual is the cause or consequence of the
individual sexual orientation, or if the size of INAH 3 and
sexual orientation covary under the influence of some third,
unidentified variable.” (LeVay, A Difference in Hypothalamic
Structure Between Heterosexual and Homosexual Men, p. 1036)
“It had also been determined that human hypothalamus was
sexually dimorphic, which is to say, certain clusters of cells in
the gland were dependably larger in men than in women.
Hypothesizing that perhaps the cells were dimorphic for sexual
orientation rather than sex, LeVay found in his forty-one brains
that clusters of INAH3 cells in the hypothalamus glands of men
who had apparently been gay were consistently smaller than
those men who had apparently been heterosexual. The brains
of the women, all who were (almost groundlessly) presumed to
be heterosexual, had similarly smaller INAH clusters. LeVay
ultimately decided that the size of the INAH3 clusters were
determined by sexual object choice, and not by sex itself. So,
brains that were attracted to women were had large INAH3
concentrations, brains that were attracted to men had smaller
ones.” (Archer, The End of Gay and the death of heterosexuality, p.
132)
“LeVay’s originality lies in proposing that the larger size of
INAH 2 and INAH 3 correlates with sexual orientation –
“desire for women” – rather than with gender – maleness – as
the previous studies had done. He summarizes and postulates at
the same time, “Thus, these two nuclei could be involved in the
generation of male- typical sexual behavior” (1035), asserting
that brain structures may cause certain behaviors.” (Spanier,
Biological Determinism and Homosexuality, p. 37 in Same-Sex Cultures
and Sexualities: An Anthropological Reader, edited by Jennifer
Robertson)
“Not only does LeVay’s thesis propose that the difference
in size is due not to gender difference as previously claimed but
to sexual orientation difference, but he also asserts that the size
difference proves a biological basis for sexual orientation. The
qualification, ‘at least in men’ (p. 1034), immediately pinpoints a
- 44 -
primary problem with LeVay’s study as he conceives it. To test
his theory, he should be comparing large enough numbers in (at
least) four categories: heterosexual men, homosexual men,
heterosexual women, and homosexual women. Note, too, that
while Laura Allen’s work found sexual dimorphism for both
INAH 2 and 3, LeVay points only to INAH 3 in his conclusion.
What do we make of this? A close analysis and critique reveals
even more serious problems with the construction of the study
leading to LeVay’s claims.” (Spanier, Biological Determinism and
Homosexuality, p. 37 in Same-Sex Cultures and Sexualities: An
Anthropological Reader, edited by Jennifer Robertson)
This study by LeVay was heralded by those advocating for
homosexuality as proof for the biological basis and innateness
of homosexuality. Those who oppose homosexuality have
raised questions concerning LeVay’s study. But of most interest
is the response to LeVay’s study by those advocating for
homosexuality. Numerous articles and books have been written
of LeVay’s study of a gay brain.
“The study, as LeVay himself admits, has several problems:
a small sample group, great variation in an individual nucleus
size, and possibly skewed results because all of the gay men had
AIDS (although LeVay found no significant difference in the
volume of INAH3 between the heterosexual men who died of
AIDS and those who died of other causes). As of this writing,
Levay’s findings have yet to be replicated by other researchers.”
(Burr, Homosexuality and Biology in Silker, Homosexuality in the
Church, p. 124)
“The reader is entitled to be skeptical if not confused by
these findings. There is either lack of consistency or of
replication. There are methodological problems. Numbers are
inevitably small, and most studies homosexual subjects have
died of AIDS; the possibility that such structural changes could
be the consequence of disease, such as AIDS, remains. But
even if these findings are substantiated, and specific areas of the
hypothalamus or elsewhere are found to be linked to sexual
orientation, it is difficult to imagine what the nature of such link
- 45 -
would be. It is certainly unlikely that there is any direct
relationship between structure of a specific area of the brain
and sexual orientation per se.” (Bancroft, Homosexual Orientation.
The search for a biological basis, p. 438)
“A second problem is that to date, there have been no
replications of LeVay’s finding; Byne (1994) reports that
Manfred Gahr at the Max Planck Institute has tried
unsuccessfully to replicate LeVay’s findings. Moreover, the
interstitial nuclei in the anterior hypothalamus vary in size, in
part in relation to seasonal factors, suggesting that these
structures are not so immutable as LeVay’s research appears to
assume. More than three dozen studies have failed to confirm
LeVay’s (1991) claim that the corpus callosum is larger in male
homosexuals than in heterosexual men.” (Cohler and Galatzer-
Levy, The Course of Gay and Lesbian Lives: Social and Psychoanalytic
Perspectives, p. 82)
There have been other various studies that conflict each
other, and LeVay’s specific research has not been replicated.
Common criticisms of LeVay’s research are with
methodological shortcomings. First is the small sample size,
there were only 41 samples of brain tissues. There are many
questions about the role of AIDS, which LeVay himself
acknowledges. But the one area of his study that has resulted in
the most criticism is how LeVay determined the sexual
orientation of the subjects. This determination was after the
fact, without any input by the subjects themselves. They had
died. In most studies and research determination of sexual
orientation or homosexuality is by self-proclamation of the
participants themselves.
“Second, questions have been raised about the fashion in
which LeVay determined the orientation of the persons whose
brains he was dissecting after death. Nineteen of the men were
assigned the designation homosexual based on it being noted in
the medical charts by their doctors; the remaining 16 men were
presumed to be heterosexual on the basis that their sexual
orientation was not mentioned in their charts. This leads us to
- 46 -
suspect LeVay did not know for sure whether the brains of
nearly half of the people he was studying were from
homosexual or heterosexual persons. Furthermore, all of the
homosexual men and 6 of the presumed 16 heterosexual men
died of AIDS.” (Jones and Yarhouse, Homosexuality: The Use of
Scientific Research in the Church’s Moral Debate, p. 70)
LeVay himself has also noted that one subject who was
listed as bisexual on his medical charts was lumped in with the
homosexual subjects.
“Medical records were his only source of information as to
the sexuality of his subjects. While the charts of those who died
from other causes than AIDS failed to specify sexual
orientation, he assumed that, based on statistical probability,
not more than one or two were likely to have been gay, and so
felt justified in using them to represent the heterosexual male
and female brain.” (Clausen, Beyond Gay or Straight: Understanding
Sexual Orientation, p. 106-107)
“Vance and others have been struck by the contrast
between the care with which LeVay measured his brain samples
and the sloppiness of his assumptions concerning his subject’s
sexuality. He had no idea how hospital workers arrived at the
conclusion that the AIDS patients for whom they recorded a
sexual orientation were indeed gay. Given what is known of
human sexual diversity, it seems safe to assume that LeVay’s
simple labels covered a wide range of specific desires and
behaviors. Those subjects who did not die of AIDS were
simply assumed, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, to
be heterosexual- a peculiarly heterosexist assumption for a gay
male researcher to make.” (Clausen, Beyond Gay or Straight:
Understanding Sexual Orientation, p. 109)
“Problems he didn’t pay much attention to include the
presumption of sexual identity in corpses that were doing no
talking for themselves. If an AIDS patient had denied any
homosexual activity to doctors before his death, his brain was
labeled heterosexual. The presumption of heterosexuality
among the women, as well, as among the men who died of
- 47 -
cause other than AIDS, was based primarily, according to a
note, on that misinterpreted Kinsey 10 percent. Chances were,
LeVay said, these people were straight.” (Archer, The End of Gay
(and the Death of Heterosexuality), p. 133)
There is also a large and common critical basis of many
scientific studies looking for biological causes this is taking
animal research and applying it towards humans. As noted
before same-sex physical activity and behavior is seen in
animals, but not a homosexual animal. Research has been done
trying to understand the mechanics of this same-sex erotic
activity, what are the biological underpinnings. There are many
studies using sheep and rats. Some of these studies in rats have
located in the rat’s brain a location that regulates sexual physical
behavior, the SDN-POA. So this area is thought to be similar
to the portion of the human hypothalamus, INAH3. But first,
different studies have found different portions of the
hypothalamus to regulate sexual behavior. Remember there are
4 parts to the anterior hypothalamus. LeVay studied the
INAH3 section of the hypothalamus. Others have criticized
LeVay for trying to connect the rat’s brain, (SDN-POA) and
the part it plays in sexual activity to the human’s INAH3
portion of the hypothalamus. Kauth’s criticism in his book is
particularly pointed and direct.
“Conceptually, LeVay’s finding could present a problem.
LeVay asserted that the INAH3 functions much like the SDN-
POA does in rats; the SDN-POA regulates sexual behavior but
is not known to control sexual desire. The ability to perform
certain sexual behaviors is not equivalent to sexual desire.
LeVay confuses sexual orientation and sexual behavior. As
motivated human behavior, erotic feelings are more complex
than reflexively thrusting a penis into an opening or presenting
one’s backside to be penetrated. Yet, by comparing the human
INAH3 to the rat’s SDN-POA, LeVay emphasizes the
importance of sexual behavior over sexual feelings and implies
that mechanical behavior is the sine qua non of human
sexuality. In actuality, the mechanics of sexual behavior –
- 48 -
mounting, thrusting, rubbing, fondling, kissing, licking, and
sucking – differ little across individuals of various erotic
interests. Only the sex of the desired partner varies. Therefore,
it is unlikely that the human INAH3 is functionally similar to
the rat SDN-POA. LeVay’s premise is faulty, and his
conclusions are suspect. His findings could easily reflect the
different environmental experiences of his subjects rather than
reveal anything about sexual orientation. No meaningful
conclusions can be drawn from LeVay’s study.” (Kauth, True
Nature A Theory of Sexual Attraction, p. 126-127)
“The deterministic view of the brain’s relation to behavior
also often assumes that brain structures influence behavior in a
one-way, cause-and-effect direction, an assumption utilized
throughout LeVay’s article until the author discusses some of
the limitations of his study. At that point he notes that his
results do not determine whether different cell cluster sizes are
the cause or the consequence of certain sexual behavior (“the
results do not allow one to decide if the size of INAH 3 in an
individual is the cause or the consequence of that individual’s
sexual orientation, or if the size of INAH 3 and sexual
orientation co-vary under the influence of some third,
unidentified variable” [1036]). Nonetheless, LeVay offers
evidence from studies of rats and a “comparable hypothalamic
nucleus, the sexually dimorphic nucleus of the preoptic area”
(comparable because it is supposedly sexually dimorphic!) to
support the theory that hypothalamic size (in rats, correlated
with sex) is fixed by prenatal hormones and does not change
with experimental changes in hormone levels (p. 1036).”
(Spanier, Biological Determinism and Homosexuality, p. 40 in Same-
Sex Cultures and Sexualities: An Anthropological Reader, edited by
Jennifer Robertson)
“When it is all said, and done, the work of LeVay is more
suggestive than anything else. It certainly does not show that
there is a hard and fast correlation between INAH3 size and
sexual orientation.” (Murphy, Gay Science: The Ethics of Sexual
Orientation Research, p. 30)
- 49 -
“Not that there weren’t reservations and problems. As
LeVay himself pointed out at the end of his Science report,
AIDS could have played a role in varying the sizes of INAH3.
INAH3 could also be determined by one’s sexual behavior
rather than being the cause of it. Or there could be some third
factor that triangulates with sexual behavior and INAH3
clusters, mitigating the cause-and-effect between the two.”
(Archer, The End of Gay (and the Death of Heterosexuality), p. 132-
133)
“Were Science and the peer reviewers of the article fair and
impartial towards this article? It may be argued no from reading
what others wrote, both those advocating for and opposed to
homosexuality.
Clearly the peer reviewers and Science’s editorial board
allowed LeVay considerable leeway in his research design,
explanatory framework, interpretations, and conclusions.”
(Spanier, Biological Determinism and Homosexuality, p. 43 in Same-
Sex Cultures and Sexualities: An Anthropological Reader, edited by
Jennifer Robertson)
“To analyze validity, we can examine and critique a number
of points in the construction of any scientific claim: the
explanatory framework and premises on which it is based, the
methods and design of the study, the presentation and
manipulation of data and conclusions drawn, and the
interpretations of the data and conclusions.
When the premises on which a study is based are faulty or
highly questionable, the question being asked in the study is
flawed. This occurs, more broadly, when the paradigm within
which the study is conducted – the explanatory framework that
guides the original question and the approach taken to answer it
– is defective or questionable (Longino). In this case,
measurements may be correct but whole conclusions may be
questioned or deemed invalid. The framework or paradigm of
an area of science can also influence the results obtained, as
Stephen Jay Gould has shown in remeasuring the size of skulls
studied by an eminent scientist in the nineteenth century.
- 50 -
Research results can be similarly faulty when a study is
poorly set up, with improper or too few controls, with an
inadequate sample size, with a non-representative or
nonrandom sample. In this case, the methods and experimental
design are often inadequate for scientific validity.
Data can also be manipulated improperly and
misrepresented. For example, the effects of increasing dosages
of a drug may be presented numerically but not displayed on a
graph, when graphing would show a dose-response curve
inconsistent with a study’s conclusions. In this and other ways,
the conclusions stated about the data can be wrong or limited in
ways not addressed by the author. Often the conclusions
summarized in the abstract are simplified or overstated and are
not supported by data buried in tables and diagrams.
The interpretations drawn from research conclusions can
also be highly suspect. Here the premises on which the study is
based, including previous research cited and the explanatory
framework, play a big role.
By analyzing any study, we can locate where and how the
authors make judgments affected by biases, and then we can
draw our own conclusions about the limitations of the study as
well as the ways that scientists incorporate their biases into their
work - and how that affects what we can learn from scientific
research.” (Spanier, Biological Determinism and Homosexuality, p.
37-38 in Same-Sex Cultures and Sexualities: An Anthropological
Reader, edited by Jennifer Robertson)
“Several premises are embedded in LeVay’s introduction, in
addition to the jump from studies of monkeys to humans. (1)
The anterior hypothalamus in the brain exerts some control
over sexual orientation in humans. (2) Size differences in one or
more clusters of cells recognizable within the anterior
hypothalamus of humans reflect differences in influence over
sexual orientation, that is, cell cluster size somehow determines
sexual behavior. This premise assumes that variations in INAH
2 and 3 are due to the difference that matters to LeVay – sexual
orientation in men – rather than to other factors affecting the
- 51 -
size of those cell clusters. (3) There exists such a thing as ‘male-
typical sexual behavior’ in humans, it differs from some other
unnamed behavior, and it is the same thing as ‘sexual
orientation, ... the direction of sexual feelings or behavior
toward members of one’s own or the opposite sex’ (p. 1034).
As we critique this premise, we reveal LeVay’s assumption
conflating sexual orientation with gender through the concept
of ‘male-typical sexual behavior,’ that is, unspecified behavior
based on the gender of the persons toward whom an individual
is oriented (‘sexually oriented toward women’ or toward men).
(4) Sexual orientation is based on biological influences that are
specific to male and female identities.” (Spanier, Biological
Determinism and Homosexuality, p. 38-39 in Same-Sex Cultures and
Sexualities: An Anthropological Reader, edited by Jennifer
Robertson)
“Other premises or assumptions built into LeVay’s
explanatory framework include a dichotomy of ‘typical sexual
behavior,’ oriented either to women (male-typical) or to men
(unspecified). The author sidesteps the relationship of those
concepts to actual sexual behavior, although he refers in his
later discussion to insertive and receptive roles among gay men
While LeVay seems to be challenging the significance of gender
(he uses ‘sex’) in brain differences, his framework and premises
strongly depend on bipolar gender categories.
LeVay’s introduction setting the framework for his
approach moves quickly through traditional explanations of
sexual behavior (from the fields of psychology, anthropology,
and religion/ethics) to ‘the biological basis of sexual
orientation,’ citing the failures of methods involving studies of
chromosomes, hormones, and brain structures to ‘establish any
consistent differences between homosexual and heterosexual
individuals’ (p. 1034).
He has chosen the anterior hypothalamus as the ‘likely
biological substrate for sexual orientation’ because in
nonhuman primates, damaging that part of the brain ‘impair[s]
heterosexual behavior without eliminating sexual drive’ (p.
- 52 -
1034). The studies he cites, assume that the ‘heterosexual
behavior’ of monkeys is the same thing as ‘male-typical’ sexual
behavior, that is, mounting of females by male monkeys.
Uncited is the evidence that mounting or presenting, whether in
monkeys or mice, is not sex-specific. Females mount males and
other females, as males also mount other males (Bleier, p. 87,
174). The edges of ‘male’ and ‘female’ categories of behavior
are blurred in monkeys and mice, as they also are in humans.
‘Sexual drive’ in the studies LeVay cites means masturbation, a
conclusion that is already somewhat questionable given the
constructed and ambiguous nature of the terms ‘male-typical
sexual behavior’ and ‘sex drive’.
What is this distinctively male-typical sexual behavior that
distinguishes heterosexual men from heterosexual women such
that the larger size of a region of the brain ‘could be involved in
the generation of male-typical sexual behavior’ (p. 1035; my
emphasis)? What does ‘typical male sex behavior, such as
attraction to females’ (Nimmons, p. 66, quoting LeVay) mean?
Does the person – male or female – desiring women exhibit
some male-typical sexual behavior by wanting to insert a penis
into a vagina? Where does that leave lesbians? Is desiring to
insert a penis into an anus very different from wishing to insert
one into a vagina? Similar or different for whom?” (Spanier,
Biological Determinism and Homosexuality, p. 39 in Same-Sex Cultures
and Sexualities: An Anthropological Reader, edited by Jennifer
Robertson)
“Another example of LeVay’s selectivity in choosing similar
studies is found buried in note 10; ‘INAH 1 is the same as the
nucleus named the ’sexually dimorphic nucleus’ and reported to
be larger in men than in women [D. F. Swaab and E. Fiers,
Science 228,1112 (1985)]. My results support the contention by
Allen et al., (6) that this nucleus is not dimorphic’ (p. 1037).
Obviously, the result of Swaab and Fliers’s study conflicted
with those of Allen’s et al. on INAH 1. LeVay simply notes that
his study agrees with the latter; his data on INAH 2, in contrast,
does not (which is explained away by age). While this may seem
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like a travesty to those unfamiliar with how science is actually
done, it is not unusual at all to have seriously conflicting results
in certain areas of research, brain and behavior for one (Fausto-
Sterling, Myths). For some scientists, such contradictory results
signal poor researchers, a poorly conceptualized research
design, or a deeply flawed explanatory framework. For others,
particularly those who accept the explanatory framework of a
whole field, the uncertainties are the price paid for investigating
complex or ill-understood phenomena. Clearly the peer
reviewers and Science’s editorial board allowed LeVay
considerable leeway in his research design, explanatory
framework, interpretations, and conclusions.” (Spanier, Biological
Determinism and Homosexuality, p. 43 in Same-Sex Cultures and
Sexualities: An Anthropological Reader, edited by Jennifer
Robertson)
What critical and objective conclusion can be gained from a
close look at LeVay’s study published in the journal Science?
Both the journal, and LeVay came under intense scrutiny.
Science was faulted for not following their own procedures and
policies for publication of articles. LeVay acknowledges it was
not an impartial study by an impartial researcher. The results
themselves are open to methodological concerns, small sample
size, determination of the sexual orientation of subjects from
which the brain tissue samples were taken, and drawing
conclusions from parallel animal research. Finally, no follow up
research has replicated his original results.
Hammer’s Gay Gene
“The publication of Hamer’s study that has been used to
herald the finding of a gay gene has had similar consequences
of acclaim and criticism.
He published a paper with this findings, which proved to be
so media-friendly that he wrote a book about the whole thing,
in which he said several times that as far as he knew there was
no such thing as a gay gene, and that, even if there was, he
hadn’t found one.” (Archer, The End of Gay (and the Death of
Heterosexuality), p. 136)
- 54 -
“While in the paper published in Science Hammer and his
colleagues claim only to have found an association between
markers in the Xq28 region and a behavioral outcome
(homosexuality), in more popular writings (Hammer and
Copeland 1994, 1998; LeVay and Hammer 1994) they blur the
distinction between association and causation in a way that
more strongly suggests a genetic basis for homosexual behavior
(Allen 1997).” (Cohler and Galatzer-Levy, The Course of Gay and
Lesbian Lives: Social and Psychoanalytic Perspectives, p. 68)
“Back in the early part of this decade, after he got fed up
with so many of his friends dying from Kaposis sarcoma, he
decided to look into a possible genetic predisposition for gay
men to get this anomalous and now predominantly AIDS-
related cancer. He didn’t find any, but in the course of studying
the gay-man DNA he’d collected, he noticed a greater than
average coincidence of a certain genetic marker along a certain
part of the long arm of the X chromosome. After a little more
casting about, he came up with some results that showed the
marker, Xq28, seemed to played some role in the sexual
orientation of somewhere between 5 and 30 percent of gay
men.” (Archer, The End of Gay (and the Death of Heterosexuality, p.
136)
“This was not, as the media chose called it, a gay gene, but
persuasive evidence of a genetic factor or factors, which in this
section of the gay community at least, are sex liked. As
previously, the genotype remains obscure. It could be of
indirect relevance (e.g. relating to some behavioral or gender
role phenotype which interacts with other influences on sexual
development). It is unlikely to be a gene which determines
sexual orientation per se.” (Bancroft, Homosexual Orientation. The
Search for a Biological Basis, p. 439)
“This study does not identify a gene for homosexuality, as
many ill-informed reports have had it. In fact, the chromosomal
region in question is large enough to contain several hundred
genes. Moreover, the genetic action at work is not decisive by
itself because there were seven pairs of gay brothers in the
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study who did not share the same genetic commonality at this
region.” (Murphy, Gay Science: The Ethics of Sexual Orientation
Research, p. 32-34)
“In both report and book, Hamer made it clear that he did
not figure he’d found a gay gene. He’d found a conspicuous
concurrence of a specific genetic marker among self-declared
homosexuals. The findings were statistically significant, but the
relationship of the genetic marker to the behaviour was as yet
undetermined.” (Archer, The End of Gay (and the Death of
Heterosexuality), p. 135)
“Hamer’s study was set up in a way that it almost
guaranteed success, in that he would find what he was looking
for. The study was of 40 brother pairs of homosexuals from
families in which the pattern of occurrence of homosexuality
suggested inheritance through the mother. In the comparison
of the x-chromosomes of the homosexual brothers, 64% of the
brother pairs shared an identical section of DNA, a different
marker for each pair.
Hamer and his colleagues also had their research published
in an article by Science in 1993, A Linkage Between DNA
Markers on the X Chromosome and Male Sexual Orientation
by Dean H. Hamer, Stella Hu, Victoria L Magnuson, Nan Hu,
and Angela M. L. Pattatucci. Hamer and others on this research
team are self-avowed homosexuals. In addition to widespread
popular media coverage similar to LeVay’s study, there were
investigations by U.S. governmental agencies of Hamer’s
research. The initial investigation was concerning possible
fraud, the selective use of data, where pairs of brothers whose
genetic makeup contradicted the finding were not included in
the findings. This investigation was conducted by the National
Institutes of Health, and was followed by an investigation of
the Federal Office of Research Integrity. A co-worker within
Hamer’s group of researchers made the claim and it was first
reported in 1995 article in the Chicago Tribune newspaper. In
December of 1996 the second investigation was closed and no
charges were filed against the researchers.
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Hamer’s criticism came from both sides of the issue, those
for and those against homosexuality. It was common criticism
of methodology by many people, but as with LeVay for those
advocating for homosexuality it was direct and pointed. Sample
size and how subjects were included in the study was noted. In
this study, it included only those where transmission of the trait
was from the mother’s side. In spite of it being called a gay gene
the actual study was looking for genetic markers and not for the
genes themselves. Most interesting is that initially the research
was not to look for a gay gene. The study was to determine if
homosexuals were genetically predisposed to alcoholism and
the AIDS-related skin cancer, Kaposis sarcoma. This study has
also not been replicated. Another study by Canadian researchers
has found different results.
Failure to use controls limits the conclusions in the research
reported by Hammer and his colleagues.” (Cohler and Galatzer-
Levy, The Course of Gay and Lesbian Lives: Social and Psychoanalytic
Perspectives, p. 66)
“Taken as a whole, Hamer’s study faces various
methodological problems, its results are open to various
interpretations (several which are more plausible then the
existence of a gay gene), and it has not been replicated. Hamer’s
study, which has been taken by many to be the centerpiece of
the emerging research program, actually exemplifies many of its
problems.” (Stein, The Mismeasure of Desire, p. 221)
“Hamer and associates did not identify genes that cause
same sex erotic attraction. They identified common markers for
male same-sex eroticism among related individuals with the
same trait. To enhance their chances of finding positive results,
Hamer and associates limited expression of the trait to maternal
transmission. Therefore, genes for the trait would be specific to
the X chromosome. Consequently, gay men with gay fathers-
who might transmit the trait on the Y chromosome-were
excluded from the study.” (Kauth, True Nature, p. 138-139)
“Hammer and Copeland note that the gay gene has not
been isolated and that Xq28 plays some role in about 5 to 30%
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of gay men. The broad range of these estimates is proof that
much more work remains to be done (1994, 146).” (Cohler and
Galatzer-Levy, The Course of Gay and Lesbian Lives: Social and
Psychoanalytic Perspectives, p. 67)
“Genetic linkage studies are particularly complicated,
technical, and vulnerable to confusion and misinterpretation
because such tiny bits of material are said to influence such
major traits as sexual attraction. Consequently, disagreements
among scientists about these analysis are many.” (Kauth, True
Nature, p. 140)
“Hamer identified five genetic markers for maternally
transmitted same-sex eroticism in males. Even so, this type of
work is in its infancy, and Hammer’s findings need to be
confirmed by independent researchers. The five markers
encompass hundreds of genes.” (Kauth, True Nature, p. 216)
“Hamer’s effort to generalize from genes to behavior would
be immensely complicated by a confrontation with the actual
complexities of human psychology, social organization, and
cultural forms. Starting from a presupposition that sexuality is
an either-or matter and that gay and straight are essential,
timeless orientations-his decision to exclude bisexuals from the
study was, he says, intentional-Hamer sets up his research in
such a way to bypass any information to the contrary and then
comes up with evidence for a gene that in turn seems to
confirm his initial categories.” (Clausen, Beyond Gay or Straight, p.
126-127)
“Rice et al. (1999) report failure to replicate Hammer’s
work. This research group was unable to find a link between
male homosexuality and Xq28, and maintains that gay brothers
are no more likely than straight brothers to share the Xq28
genetic marker. Further, this group found little evidence
supporting Hammer’s claim of maternal transmission.
Wickelgren (1999) reviews findings reported at the 1998
meetings of the American Psychiatric Association which also
failed to replicate the findings of Hammer and concludes that
there is very little evidence supporting the hypothesis that Xq28
- 58 -
is a genetic marker linked to homosexuality.” (Cohler and
Galatzer-Levy, The Course of Gay and Lesbian Lives: Social and
Psychoanalytic Perspectives, p. 67)
“The evidence for a genetic component for homosexuality
is hardly overwhelming. Numerous studies that purport to
prove the existence of a genetic aspect to homosexuality are
either anecdotal or seriously flawed. Homosexuality is often
poorly defined and researchers use a variety of behavioral
measures. The sample sizes are too small and recruitment of
subjects is biased.” (McGuire, Is Homosexuality Genetic? A Critical
Review and Some Suggestions, p. 140-141 in Sex, Cells, and Same-Sex
Desire: The Biology of Sexual Preference, editors John P. De Cecco,
Ph.D. and David Allen Parker, M.A.)
“To be specific, it is necessary to investigate the biological
research to determine exactly what it has to say about
homosexuality. The studies of LeVay and Hamer, for example,
which are often associated with the biological argument, were
limited in scope and never have been satisfactorily replicated
(Crewdson 1995). In addition, both studies used only male
subjects; therefore, the data only support the biological
argument as applied to male homosexuals. Finally, both
LeVay’s and Hamer’s studies draw on a wide variety of
scientific studies that contain varying theories of male
homosexuality, many of which conceptualize male
homosexuality as pathology.” (Brookey, Reinventing the Male
Homosexual: The Rhetoric and Power of the Gay Gene, p. 7)
“The argument for homosexual immutability betrays a
misreading of the scientific research itself. Nothing in any of
these studies can fully support the idea that homosexuality is
biologically immutable, each study leaves open the possibility
that homosexuality is the result of a combination of biological
and environmental factors, and several suggest that
homosexuality may be tied to a predisposition in temperament
that could manifest itself in a number of ways. All, agree that
biological, social, and psychological factors interact to produce
and change the signs of homosexuality. Furthermore, these
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studies cannot comment effectively on the frequency of
homosexuality in the general population.” (Terry, An American
Obsession, p. 394)
“As this survey indicates, research currently cited in support
of a biological model of human sexuality is methodologically
deficient, inclusive, or open to contradictory theoretical
interpretations. In addition, much of such research concentrates
on animal studies and therefore has little relationship to human
behavior which is generally affected by cultural values.
Therefore, this paper basic question is: How convincing is the
biological evidence that the details of human sexuality are
directly due to innate traits and processes? The answer is the
evidence is far from persuasive. We may conclude that the
biological perspective on human sexuality has not yet made a
substantial contribution to the balanced biosocial synthesis that
the Baldwins (1980) have recommended.
This conclusion is not intended to imply that biology has
nothing to do with human sexuality (since the two, are of
course, inextricably intertwined). It means simply this: The
claim that biological factors have an immediate, direct influence
on such things as sexual identity, behavior, or orientation
remains unproven. When biology seems to be critical in such
matters, an intervening cultural factor is often more
immediate.” (Hoult, Human Sexuality in Biological Perspective:
Theoretical and Methodological Considerations, p. 150-151 in De
Cecco and Shively, Bisexual and Homosexual Identities: Critical
Theoretical Issues, editors John P. De Cecco and Michael G.
Shively)
“Although we have sought to provide a balanced
understanding of the issues involved in study and treatment,
review of extant findings has led to several conclusions which
inform the book. In the first place, while genetic influences
might play some role in determining sexual orientation,
evidence reported to date does not permit such a conclusion.
Neither do extant studies of biological factors such as hormonal
changes in prenatal life among men later identifying as gay
- 60 -
support the hypothesis that such factors have an important role
in explaining same-gender sexual orientation.
Findings from developmental studies suggest that sexual
orientation is much more fluid across the course of life than has
often been recognized.” (Cohler and Galatzer-Levy, The Course
of Gay and Lesbian Lives: Social and Psychoanalytic Perspectives, p. 9)
What is important is to understand what is now commonly
spoken of as sexual orientation. Whether it is heterosexual,
homosexual, or bisexual. And most important of all is the
biological role that may play in one being a heterosexual,
homosexual, or a bisexual.
Sexual Orientation
“There are no sexual instincts in man. Human sexual
behavior, as we have seen, varies widely from individual to
individual and from culture to culture, and human sexual
behavior is entirely dependent upon learning and conditioning.
The tastes, preferences, goals, and motives that determine the
individual’s pattern of sexual behavior are acquired in the
context of his unique experiences and are in no sense innate or
inherited. Only if this fact is thoroughly integrated and
absorbed is it possible to discuss human sexual phenomena
from a scientific standpoint.” (Churchill, Homosexual Behavior
Among Males: A Cross-Cultural and Cross-Species Investigation, p.
101)
“Like other aspects of human behavior, sexual orientation is
the outcome of a complex interplay of different factors, some
of them physical, some of them hereditary, but most of them
environmental. Environmental influences include general
cultural habits and expectations, as well as particular
characteristics of the individual’s family upbringing and person
circumstances. No single, predominant cause for all cases of
homosexual orientation is ever likely to be found.” (West,
Homosexuality Re-Examined, p. 320)
“Although there is no reliable evidence that sexual
orientation is genetically inherited, neither is there evidence for
the conclusion by Hoult (1984) that it is the result of social-
- 61 -
learning. The available evidence forces one to consider that
neither nature or nurture provides the sole answer to the cause
of sexual orientation, either heterosexual or homosexual. One
may consider that genetic material (nature) is acted upon during
a critical period by environmental influences (nurture) or, in a
more general sense, that neither influence can act without the
other. Human beings are born with the potential for sexual
behavior.” (Haynes, A Critique of the Possibility of Genetic Inheritance
and Homosexual Orientation, p. 108-109 in Sex, Cells, and Same-Sex
Desire: The Biology of Sexual Preference, editors John P. De Cecco,
Ph.D. and David Allen Parker, M.A.)
“All available scientific evidence points to the conclusion
that sexual orientation, be it heterosexual, ambisexual, or
homosexual, is a result of the interaction of genotype and
environment. People are born with the innate ability to perform
sexually, but the focus of that performance is no more
immutable than language skills. Further, there is evidently great
plasticity in orientation, as one moves from one point on the
sexual continuum to another, for differing lengths of time, and
at different periods of one’s life. The constraints placed by
social order on particular orientations have no basis in biology.
Thus, homosexuals should seek their liberation through
political and social efforts rather than biological research.”
(Haynes, James D., Ph.D., A Critique of the Possibility of Genetic
Inheritance and Homosexual Orientation, p. 111 in Sex, Cells, and
Same-Sex Desire: The Biology of Sexual Preference, editors John P. De
Cecco, Ph.D. and David Allen Parker, M.A.)
“Social theory and the study of the lives of gay and straight
men and women converge to show that the experience of
sexual desire is not fixed but varies across the course of life.
Sexual orientation should not be viewed from an
essentialists perspective that regards sexual desire as
predetermined by either innate or developmental factors; sexual
desire is fluid and changing in its significance for society and
persons over historical time and in lived experience within
lifetimes. Little is known about factors leading to either
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heterosexuality or homosexuality. The meaning of same-gender
desire is founded in social and historical circumstances, which
change over time and across generations or cohorts. Social
contexts and personal life circumstances alike influence the
presently told life story narrated and collaboratively re-
constructed in psychoanalysis.” (Cohler and Galatzer-Levy, The
Course of Gay and Lesbian Lives: Social and Psychoanalytic Perspectives,
p. 421)
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Clausen, Jan. Beyond Gay or Straight: Understanding Sexual
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Gudel, Joseph P. Homosexuality: Fact and Fiction. Christian
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York and London, 1997.

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Chapter 4
Types of Homosexualities

Same sex physical sexual activity, homosexuality, can be


historically documented; this activity in and of it is not disputed.
This same sex physical sexual activity, homosexuality, has been
tolerated; but the meaning given to it has been culturally
specific according the individual society in which it takes place.
The norm in all cultures and societies is opposite sex physical
sexual activity, heterosexuality, marriage and procreation. The
idea of a gay identity (two adults in a homosexual relationship)
is a modern western cultural type of homosexuality. A gay
identity also must be viewed in the social political context in
which gives it its name and form.
Furthermore, it was not until near the end of the twentieth
century that a gay liberation movement has emerged and made
homosexuality a controversial issue. Most commonly seen is
that reluctantly societies tolerated some adult male same-sex
relations with even more acceptance of adult female same-sex
relations. While they more generously approved sexual relations
between men and boys with some qualifications: the practice
was understood more or less as a rite of passage which must
end for the man in his late twenties and for the boy in early
teens. In all instances of homosexuality continuing on today,
homosexuality is based on behaviors and same-sex physical
sexual activity, today the emphasis is based on self-identification
as being a homosexual. This ;homosexual today is a pattern of
essentially exclusive adult same-sex relationships, that
historically and culturally specific to post-modern western
societies.
“Equally diverse are the forms of its acceptance. In one
group of societies homosexual contacts are tacitly allowed or
tolerated for a definite category of people, for example,
adolescent boys or bachelors, or for a definite situation, as
something temporary, unavoidable, or unimportant. In other
- 67 -
societies, such contracts are prescribed as a necessary element
of some sacred rites, for example, in initiation rites. In the third
case, homosexual relationships constitute an aspect of a more
or less prolonged social process, like socialization of
adolescents. In the fourth case homosexuality is symbolized as a
permanent life-style with a corresponding social role/identity.
Individual sexual motivation is dependent on these cultural
variations.” (Kon, A Socicultural Approach, p. 278-279 in Theories
of Human Sexuality, editors James H. Geer and William T. O
Donohue, Plenum Press, New York and London, 1987)
“Thus whereas homosexual behaviour can be found in
cultures as different as ancient Greece, modern American
prisons and the Melanesian cultures of Papa New Guinea, this
does not equate with the notion of the homosexual as a fixed
social role or condition.” (Horrocks, An Introduction to the Study
of Sexuality, p. 146)
“Homosexual acts are probably universal in humans but
institutionalized forms of homosexual activity are not; and
these depend to a great extent, upon specific historical
problems and outlooks of a culture.” (Herdt, Same Sex, Different
Cultures, p. 55)
“Homosexuality as we know it -that is, long-term
relationships of mutual consent between adults-simply did not
exist before the nineteen century, when it was invented by
scientists to create a pathological condition out of a rarely
practiced behavior (previously known primarily as sodomy) The
construction of the condition made it possible for increasing
numbers of people to identify with it, and eventually to react
against its pathological status.” (Schmidt, Straight and Narrow?, p.
142-143)
“Although same-sex attractions and sexual behavior have
undoubtedly occurred throughout history, lesbian, gay, and
bisexual identities are relatively new (D’Emilio, 1983). The
contemporary notion of identity is itself historically created
(Baummeister, 1986). The concept of a specifically homosexual
identity seems to have emerged at the end of the nineteen-
- 68 -
century. Indeed, only in relatively recent years have large
numbers of individuals identified themselves openly as gay or
lesbian or bisexual. Gay, lesbian, and bisexual public identities,
then, are a phenomenon of our current historical era (D’Emilio,
1983; Faderman, 1991).” (Patterson, Sexual Orientation and
Human Development: An Overview, p. 3)
“Historical and anthropological research has shown that
homosexual persons (i.e. people who occupy a social position
or role as homosexuals) do not exist in many societies, whereas
homosexual behavior occurs in virtually society. Therefore, we
must distinguish between homosexual behavior and
homosexual identity. One term refers to one’s sexual activity
per se (whether casual or regular); the other word defines
homosexuality as a social role, with its emotional and sexual
components. Such distinction is consciously rooted in historical
and cross-cultural comparisons between homosexuality in
advanced societies and homosexuality in other cultures or eras.”
(Escoffier, American Homo: Community and Perversity, p. 37)
“Lesbian and gay historians also discovered that
homosexual activity frequently took place in some societies
without the presence of people defined as homosexuals, and
that intense homosocial or erotic relationships existed between
people who did not otherwise appear to be homosexuals.”
(Escoffier, American Homo: Community and Perversity, p. 110)
“The cross-cultural data on homosexuality (and almost all it
concerns males alone) is also scarce, of dubious quality and
sometimes difficult to interpret. There are, of course, the
famous instances of widespread male homosexual practices, but
the data are often less than the fame. Classical Greece and some
Arab societies are cases of this sort, and one is forced to
consider the possibility that these examples have as much to do
with cultural stereotyping as with a genuine cultural pattern.”
(Davenport Sexual in Cross-Cultural Perspective in Beach, Human
Sexuality in Four Perspectives, p. 153)
“When contemporary homosexuals invoke history and
anthropology in defense of homosexuality and in opposition to
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exclusive and universal heterosexuality, their argument is
empirically shaky. Actually, history and anthropology provide
no evidence for the tolerance of exclusive homosexuality for
any general population. There is no society that approves of
exclusive homosexuality for the general population, male or
female. Some societies permit a small number of men (less
commonly women) to engage in nothing but homosexual
liaisons, often in conjunction with other roles, such as shamans,
magicians, or sorcerers.” (Goode, Deviant Behavior, p. 193)
Therefore, in the past, homosexuality has not posed the
same issues as today.
“Homosexuality may be the key to understanding the whole
of human sexuality. No subject cuts in so many directions into
psychology, sociology, history, and morality. The incidence, as
well as visibility, of homosexuality has certainly increased in the
Western world in the past twenty-five years. But discussion of it
rapidly became over politicized after the Stonewall rebellion of
1969, which began the gay liberation movement. Viewpoints
polarized: people were labeled pro-gay or anti-gay, with little
room in between. For the past decade, the situation has been
out of control: responsible scholarship is impossible when
rational discourse is being policed by storm troopers, in this
case gay activists, who have the absolutism of all fanatics in
claiming sole access to the truth.” (Paglia, Vamps and Tramps, p.
67)
“Consequently in sections that follow - an exploration of
attitudes and customs of ancient peoples toward same-sex
eroticism the modern concepts of homosexuality or sexual
orientation; will be conspicuous by their absence. Within these
cultures, sexual contact between persons of the same sex is not
necessarily seen as characteristic of a particular group or subset
of persons; there is no category or homosexuals. On the
contrary, in some cultures, same-sex eroticism was an expected
part of the sexual experience of every member of society, which
would seem to argue against the existence of homosexuality as a

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personal attribute at all.” (Mondimore, A Natural History of
Homosexuality, p. 4)
“Descriptions of the Greeks, the berdaches, and the Sambia
should make us a little unsure about our categories homosexual
and heterosexual-at least, they should make us think more
carefully about what we mean by these words. But if we are
now a little confused about categories, perhaps we can agree on
a few simple facts about human sexuality: (1) same-sex
eroticism has existed for thousands of years in vastly different
times and cultures; (2) in some cultures, same-sex eroticism was
accepted as a normal aspect of human sexuality, practiced by
nearly all individuals some time of the time; and (3) in nearly
every culture that has been examined in any detail, a few
individuals seem to experience a compelling and abiding sexual
orientation toward their own sex.” (Monimore, A Natural
History of Homosexuality, p. 20)
“The universal claims of the gay myth have seduced
otherwise careful scholars to reinterpret history and
anthropology in the same way, applying our peculiar
explanation of homosexual behaviors to other cultures and
other times. Works on Homosexuality in Greece, for example,
have attempted to explain the homosexual habits of the Greeks
in terms of sexual orientation, an explanation the Greeks
themselves would have found eccentric and probably offensive
(along with our concepts of sexuality another concept of quite
modern origins).
Similar descriptions of the berdaches found among
American Indian societies as a common institutionalized form
of homosexuality are also a mistake. There is no indication that
sexual orientation had anything to do with choosing the life of a
berdache. North American Indians had a tolerance for gender
ambiguity that provided for more than one gender role without
reference to sexual orientation.
The sexual practices of other societies are frequently similar
in appearance but express quite different beliefs and social
priorities. As anthropologists have told us, no human behaviors
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are more flexible, more malleable, or more expressive of the
social structure of society than sexual behaviors, and it does no
good to impose the sexual meanings of one society on others.”
(DuBay, Gay Identity: The Self Under Ban, p. 6)
Today as we discuss the topic of homosexuality, we see a
wide variety of expressions of it in the lives of people. So now
the term homosexualities is often applied in the literature on
this topic. When talking about types of homosexualities we
must remember we are taking a “verb” and using it as a “noun”;
using two different parts of speech to label the same idea. I
want to frame the discussion this way, who one is, a
homosexual and what one does, homosexuality. Also, as we
discuss types of homosexualities today we are doing so from a
framework of our “postmodern generation” and “western
cultural” lenses. There have become two sides in this
discussion, with a moral line dividing them: a pro-gay side,
(those who support a homosexual identity, including individuals
who accept this identity), and those who oppose
this;homosexual or gay identity. So often objectivity has
become the “baby thrown out with the bath water”. Common
sense has been replaced by blind passion. This objectivity has
also been lost in the scientific community. Before accepting the
outcome of a scientific project, we must determine, whether the
scientists have a particular political/societal agenda. Is the
scientist himself accepting a “gay identity”? This present
discussion, types of homosexualities is coming from a
sociological framework, looking for a scientific causation may
be found within my discussion about scientific studies.
Facultative and Obligative Homosexuality
Various authors use several terms in speaking about types of
homosexualities. Sometimes you will see the terms facultative
and obligative used describing homosexuality. The later,
obligative, is considered exclusive homosexuality, a condition in
which a person can only bond or pair with a person of the same
sex. There is no option for bisexual or heterosexual bonding.
Facultative homosexuality is a technical term for sexual
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orientation and sexual activity with persons of the same sex.
This term does not exclude sexual relations with members of
the opposite sex; it also may be referred to as bisexuality. The
same-sex physical activity may be engaged in only for sexual
release, power, or control, or in situations where there are no
members of the opposite sex, such as in a prison.
Compulsive, symptomatic, and episodic homosexuality
One author uses three broad categories, compulsive,
symptomatic, and episodic homosexuality. (See John F. Harvey,
The Truth About Homosexuality.) This last one, episodic, is a
catchall term and is also called situational or variational. Here
an individual participates in same-sex physical acts (homosexual
activity), but they would normally be heterosexual in their
orientation. Homosexual activity takes place in times or places
where heterosexual activity is not possible, where people are
separated by their sex, for example prisons, schools etc. Also,
this homosexual activity may be seen in children or adolescents
who do so out of curiosity or in learning about sex. Older
individuals may engage in homosexual activity for money, in
search of a new thrill, from indifference to sexual morals, or
even in rebellion to cultural norms.
When speaking about symptomatic homosexuality, one is
acting homosexually as a symptom of a more general
personality problem. The stronger impetus to homosexual
activity is to resolve a personality/relational conflict which has
become sexualized. Three possible areas, though there may be
others, can be summarized. There may be problems of
unsatisfied dependency needs, such as for love and affirmation.
It may be in the area of control issues, seen in unresolved
power or dominance needs. So often this is involved with
sexual abuse as a child, which possibly leads them to abuse
others later on. Boys who are abused by other older males,
often feel because this has happened to them, he must be a
homosexual himself. This self-labeling may result in these
individuals continuing on with a false line of thinking, giving

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into homosexual physical acts and accepting the homosexual
identity and behavior.
Compulsive or obligatory homosexuality has its origins with
childhood developmental relational conflicts with their parents
and peers. This category is associated with what is being called
sexual orientation. The child may prefer and exhibit non-gender
conforming behavior, which results in labeling and identifying
with homosexuality. Other typical patterns are a passive, absent,
or rejecting same sex parent. For males, it is a strong mother,
overshadowing the father. For females, it is often seen as a
result of sexual abuse. For both sexes, it may be a result of early
exposure to sex, which is not age appropriate. At a very early
age the individual child sees and feels himself as being different
and not accepted. As a result of relational/emotional needs
become sexualized during puberty. Whatever the impetus that
results into acquiring compulsive homosexuality, its underlying
cause is not of being born a homosexual.
Institutional homosexualities
More often by many authors homosexuality is discussed
within the framework of three types of institutional
homosexualities gender-reversed, role-specialized, and age-
structured to prove a fourth commonly identified
homosexuality the “gay identity”. Many of these authors are
advocates for homosexuality.
“To facilitate the presentation of the cross-cultural cases, I
use a model that takes into account five widely agreed on forms
of same-gender relations around the world. These forms are (1)
age-structured relations as the basis for homoerotic
relationships between older and younger males, (2) gender-
transformed homoerotic roles that allow a person to take the
sex/gender role of the other gender, (3) social roles that permit
or require the expression of same-gender relations as a
particular niche in society, (4) western homosexuality as a
nineteenth-century form of sexual identity, and (5) late-
twentieth-century western egalitarian relationships between
persons of the same gender who are self-consciously identified
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as gay or lesbian for all of their lives.” (Herdt, Gilbert, Same Sex,
Different Cultures: Gays and Lesbians Across Cultures, p. 22-23)
1. Gender-reversed homosexuality
One institutional example is the berdache, among Native
American groups. The role of the berdache, is in a religious
context. This person is spoken of as being two spirited. This is
referred to as transgenderal or gender-reversed homosexuality.
Here typically a male plays out the role of a female. The
anatomical sex of these individuals are not question, it is the
mechanism of selection of an individual that is not known. One
controversial thought is that an individual may be selected
because of a genetic predisposition to the role, for example they
have feminine physical traits and characteristics. This is not
unlike the labeling of those in western culture as “gay or queer”
given by peers today to individuals based on their physical
appearance and mannerisms. They “look and fit” the role. In
these societies heterosexual marriage and parenthood are the
normative. The berache is accepted, but is not the normative.
The gender reversal of this norm therein implies discontinuity
from childhood to adult sexual development. Berache could
marry and have children.
“It is particularly striking that although many American
tribes had a social category like the berdache, some did not,
suggesting that it is particular social structures that create such
categories, not individual personalities or pre-existent sexual
needs.” (Horrocks, An Introduction to the Study of Sexuality, p. 149)
“Another institutionalized from of homosexuality existed in
many American Indian societies. Girls and boys in these
societies could refuse initiation into their adult gender roles and
instead adopt the social role of the other gender. For example,
men who dressed and acted in accordance with the adult female
role were known as two-spirited or berdache (originally the
French term for these Indians). The berdache often married
Indian men. The partners in these marriages did not define
themselves as homosexuals, nor did their societies recognize
them as such, but their marital sex life consisted of homosexual
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sexual relations.” (Escoffier, Jeffrey, American Homo Community
and Perversity, p. 37)
“A third characteristic of a berache is that she or he was
allowed to choose a marital partner of the same sex. This is not
necessarily prescribed: female berdaches are known to have
married men, and male ones have married women in both cases
without losing their berdache status. So the element which
detemined the identityof the berdache was not the choice of
sexual partner but rather her or his occupation.” (Wiering, An
Anthropological Critique of Constructionis: Berdaches and Butches, p.
224-225 in Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality? by Dennis
Altman)
“The phenomenon of the berdache in native American
cultures has attracted considerable attention from
anthropologists, and has sometimes been claimed to be an
analogue of the Western ‘homosexual’. The berdache is a man
in woman’s clothing, carrying out women’s occupations, and
having sex with men. Such men are found in many native
American societies, but the berdache seems to be defined
primarily in terms of female occupation and clothing, and only
secondarily by sexual object choice, whereas in the West
‘homosexuality’ is defined by the latter. Thus the term
‘berdache’ seems more akin to the English term ’transvestite’.”
(Horrocks, An Introduction to the Study of Sexuality, p. 148)
2. Role-specialized homosexuality
A second type, role-specialized homosexuality is less
commonly discussed, but may still be documented. Here
something must be added and adapted for homosexuality to
occur. It is recognized only for people who occupy a certain
status role. An institutional example for this type is the Chuckee
shaman. Again, as with the berdache, we have a religious
context. The Chuckee shaman has a religious vision quest that
leads to the feeling that he should cross-dress and engage in
homosexual activity. Most of this type of homosexuality, role-
specialized, is seen among females, with there being a further
division among woman in class-stratified and nonclass societies.
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Another striking similarity as seen in gender-reversed
homosexuality discussed before, we find this type also to be a
discontinuity. Heterosexuality is the normative sexuality,
resulting in marriage and parenthood. There must be the
allowance for enduring homoerotic bonding that may occur,
but if it does, it is rare and infrequent.

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Chapter 5
Types of Homosexualities/Age-Structured

“In Athens, homosexuality (which as we know was really


pederasty, in the sense the sexual relationship between and
adult and a young boy) held an important position in the moral
and political formation of young men, who learned from their
adult lovers the virtues of a citizen.” (Cantarella, Bisexuality in the
Ancient World, p. viii)
“Such pederasty was supposed to transmit manly virtues of
mind and body from nobleman to young lover (Vangaard,
1972).” (Karlen, Homosexuality in History, p. 79 in Homosexual
Behavior: A Modern Reappraisal, editor Judd Marmor)
“For instance, in ancient Greece, homosexual relationships
between older men and younger men were commonly accepted
as pedagogic. Within the context of an erotic relation, the older
man taught the younger one military, intellectual, and political
skills. The older men, however, were also often husbands and
fathers. Neither sexual relationship excluded the other. Thus,
although ancient Greek society recognized male homosexual
activity, the men in these relationships rarely defined
themselves as primarily homosexual.” (Escoffier, American
Homo: Community and Perversity, p. 37)
“So these love relationships were not private erotic
enterprises. They took place openly before the eyes of the
public, were regarded as of great importance by the state, and
were supervised by its responsible authorities.” (Vanggard,
Phallos: A Symbol and Its History in the Male World, p. 39)
“They were tied together in a pact equally compelling for
both. It was the obligation of the erastes always to be an
outstanding and impeccable example to the boy. He should not
commit any deed that would shame the boy. His total
responsibility to the boy made him dependent on the boy in
ways far beyond the purely erotic. He was judged by the
development and conduct of the boy. Even in regards to the
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bodily aspect of the relationship the boy could assert himself
against his tutor.” (Vanggard, Phallos: A Symbol and Its History in
the Male World, p. 88)
“Many scholars have written much about early paiderastra-
since Homer does not mention it, some scholars argue that it
must be an innovation of the later Iron Age. Scholars than
looked for causes (population control [Percy, 1996], or a
byproduct of athletic nudity [Scanlon, 2002]. Paiderastra,
however, is not homosexuality; it is a coming-of-age rite, and as
such it has anthropological parallels that situate it in a stage of
state-formation, at the tribal level. In that case, paiderastria
should originate in the Bronze Age (Cantarella, 1992, p. 5), and
I myself would put its development no later than the Middle
Bronze Age (ca. 1900-1600 BCE).” (Younger, Sex in the Ancient
World From A to Z, p. xv)
“The practice born in the Greek gymnasium to which
Cicero refers to is not homosexuality but paiderastia, the
courtship of free youths by older males, and the central issue
was status rather than gender.” (Williams, Roman Homosexuality
Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity, p. 64)
“The abundant surviving literature composed by the
ancients in praise of pederasty always assumes it to be an affair
of minds, not bodies, a pure, Platonic love, as still call it today,
from which carnality is excluded. It was declared that Eros in
such cases would not tolerate the presence of his mother
Aphrodite. For Eos, as we have already suggested, symbolized
the passion of the soul, and Aphrodite fleshly unions, whether
homosexual or not.” (Flacelliere, Love in Ancient Greece, p. 67)
“Instead the homosexual connection favored by the Greeks
was not so much homoerotic as pederastic; the archetypal
relationship was between a mature man at the height of his
sexual power and need and a young, erotically underdeveloped
boy just before puberty. The standard Greek nomenclature
gives the older, aggressive partner the title of the lover (erastes)
and the young, passive male that of the beloved (eromenos).”

- 79 -
(Keuls, The Reign of the Phallus Sexual Politics in Ancient Greece, p.
275)
“The model of socially validated homosexuality was
paiderastia (following Thorkil Vanggaard I will use this form to
avoid identifying the Greek practice with the associations
pederasty has in our world), the love of an older man for a
youth (By older man here we mean mostly men in their
twenties, while youths were adolescents.) The context was the
gymnasium, where youths went to exercise (and display) their
physical gifts, and the older men went to watch, appreciate and
select. The arena was an upper-class one paiderastia was
essentially an aspect of the paideia, the training for citizenship
of aristocratic youths. (That same-sex love tended to be
mocked in comedy, an art form that attracted the masse may
indicate it played a less focal role in their lives.” (Downing,
Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love, p. 137)
“To facilitate the understanding of the Hellenic love of
boys, it will be as well to say something about the Greek ideal
of beauty. The most fundamental difference between ancient
and modern culture is that ancient is throughout male and that
the woman only comes into the scheme of the Greek man as
mother of his children and as manager of household matters.
Antiquity treated the man, and the man only, as the focus of all
intellectual life. This explains why the bringing up and
development of girls was neglected in a way we can hardly
understand; but boys, on the other hand, were supposed to
continue their education much later than is usual with us. The
most peculiar custom, according to our ideas, was that every
man attracted to him some boy or youth and, in the intimacy of
daily life, acted as his counselor, guardian, and friend, and
prompted him in all manly virtues. It was especially in the Doric
states that this custom prevailed, and it was recognized so much
as a matter of course by the State that it was considered a
violation of duty by the man, if he did not draw one younger to
him, and a disgrace to the boy if he was not honoured by the
friendship of a man. The senior was responsible for the manner
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of life of his young comrade, and shared with him blame and
praise.” (Licht, Sexual Life in Ancient Greece, p. 418)
“It is beyond dispute, therefore, shocking as the fact may
appear, that homosexuality contributed to the formation of the
moral ideal which underlies the whole practice of Greek
education. The desire in the older lover to assert himself in the
presence of the younger, to dazzle him, and the reciprocal
desire of the latter to appear worthy of his senior’s affection
necessarily reinforced in both persons that love of glory which
always appealed to the competitive spirit of mankind. Love-
affairs accordingly provided the finest opportunities for noble
rivalry. From another point of view the ideal of comradeship in
battle reflects the entire system of ethics implied in chivalry,
which is founded on the sentiment of honour.” (H.-I. Marrou,
Histoire de l’ éducation dans Antiquité, p. 58-59)
But the apprenticeship to courage and the love of honour
and glory, important as they were to the Greeks, comprised
only a part of Greek education. For lovers claimed that they
participated actively in all the moral and intellectual
development of their loved ones.” (Flacelliere, Love in Ancient
Greece, p. 87)
“Basic to the understanding of the nature, meaning, and
importance of paiderasty is the following:
Firstly, the age difference between the erastes and his
eromenos was always considerable. The eraste was a grown
man, the eromenos still an immature boy or youth.” (Vanggard,
Phallos: A Symbol and Its History in the Male World, p. 43)
“Secondly, as has been demonstrated, an ethical basis was
essential for the Dorian relationship.” (Vanggard, Phallos: A
Symbol and Its History in the Male World, p. 43)
“Thirdly, the homosexuality of the paidersty relationship
had nothing to do with effeminacy. On the contrary, among the
Dorians the obvious aim of education was manliness in its most
pronounced forms. Refinement in the manner of dressing and
in regards to food, house, furniture, or other circumstances of
daily life was looked upon with contempt. Contemporary as
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well as later sources agree in stressing that it was among the
warlike Dorians in particular that paidersty flourished.”
(Vanggard, Phallos: A Symbol and Its History in the Male World, p.
44)
“Fourthly, Dorian paiderasty was something entirely
different from homosexuality in the usual sense in which we
use the term, as inversion (see definition on page 17). We have
repeatedly pointed out that ordinary men regularly cultivated
paiderasty and active heterosexuality at the same time. Men who
stuck exclusively to boys and did not marry were punished,
scorned, and ridiculed by the Spartan authorities, and treated
disrespectfully by the young men.” (Vanggard, Phallos: A Symbol
and Its History in the Male World, p. 44)
“From the point of view of many older male lovers, boys
and girls were equally desirable, but elite girls were secluded at
home, while boys went to school and exercised nude at the
gymnasium. Teenage male youths were seen as the most
beautiful objects of desire, muscular yet, still hairless, smooth-
skinned, with the small, delicate penises adult Greek men
regarded as erotic. Since they were young they did not have the
status of adult males and could be seen as somewhat feminine.
When boys reached the age where they began to sprout beards
and public hair, when their skin grew coarse they seemed much
less desirable; they acquired the status of citizens, and might
pursue their own young male lovers before they married.”
(Clark, Desire: A History of European Sexuality, p. 23)
“If we are to draw conclusions from what has been said as
to the ethics of Greek love of boys, the following emerges as an
undeniable fact: The Greek love of boys is a peculiarity of
character, based upon an aesthetic and religious foundation. Its
object is, with the assistance of the State, to arrive at the power
to maintain the same and at the fountain-head of civic and
personal virtue. It is not hostile to marriage, but supplements it
as an important factor in education.” (Licht, Sexual Life in
Ancient Greece, p. 445)

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“Although the Greeks believed that the same desire
attracted one to whatever was desirable, they nonetheless
thought this desire entailed particular problems when it arose in
a relationship between two males of distinct age cohorts, one of
whom had not received yet achieved the status of adult citizen.
The disparity was what gave the relationship its value-and what
made it morally problematical. An elaborate ritualization of
appropriate conduct on the part of both participates was
designed to give such relationships a beautiful form, one that
would honor the youth’s ambiguous status. As not yet a free
adult male, he was an appropriate object of masculine desire; as
already potentially a free citizen, his future subjectively must be
honored. The active role can only be played by the older
partner, but the younger partner must be treated as free to
accept or reject his suitor. Thus the Greeks believed that the
relationship should be designed so as to provide an opportunity
for the younger to begin to learn the self-mastery that would be
expected of him as an adult. The older man’s desire was seen as
unproblematic; what was difficult was how to live that desire in
such a way that its object might in turn become a subject.”
(Downing, Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love, p. 138)
“The truth is that pederasty is a vice encouraged by
abnormal social conditions, such as life in military camps or
purely masculine communities. Society was essentially
masculine in the classical period of Greek civilization, even
outside of Sparta. Homosexuality in fact develops wherever
men and women live separate lives and differences in education
and refinement between the sexes militate against normal sexual
attraction. The more uncompromising such separation and
diversity become, more widespread homosexuality will be.”
(Flaceleitere, Love in Ancient Greece, p. 215-216)
erastes and eromenos
In a pederastic relationship there were two partners, the
older one was called the erastes and the younger was the
eromenos. The relationship was to end when the younger one
was around 18 years of age, when he started growing facial hair.
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While the relationship began about the time the younger one
started puberty. After the relationship ended the younger,
eromenos, was expected to marry, and then he could then
become the erastes to a younger partner. The relationship was
based a mutual liking of both partners towards one another.
Ideally, more importantly the older, erastes, was always to have
the best interest of the younger, eromenos, in mind. Thus, this
was not a sexual relationship, but one of educating and training
the younger by the older to be a successful adult male in Greek
society.
“In Athens, the adult man socialized the boy into adult male
society and the adolescent expressed his gratitude by granting
his erasted (favor (kharis), sexual license, even intercrural
intercourse. Only the erastes was meant to experience Love
(eros); the eromenos should experience friendship (philia; but
see Johns, 1982, p. 101; DeVires, 1997; Halperin, 1997, p. 45-
54).” (Younger, Sex in the Ancient World From A to Z, p. 92)
“The erastes, adult male lover, would offer gifts, such as the
apple (with its erotic significance) or a rooster, or more
extravagantly, a horse or chariot to his young male beloved, the
eromenos. In vessels probably intended for symposia, painters
depicted sex between men and youths as intercrural intercourse,
the man’s penis inserted between the boy’s thighs. It would
have been shameful for the boy to submit to anal sex. This
behavior continued in classical fifth- and fourth- century
Athens, but it had to be carefully modulated. A man gained
honor by aggressively pursuing and conquering a boy, but if the
boy surrendered for money, than he would lose honor. It was
shameful for a father or guardian to prostitute his own son, and
if he did so, the boy had no obligation to support him in his old
age.” (Clark, Desire: A History of European Sexuality, p. 23)
“Furthermore, it is only the desire to play the active role
that is regarded as natural. The younger male yields to the
older’s importunities out of admiration, compassion, or
gratitude but is expected to feel neither desire or enjoyment.”
(Downing, Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love, p. 139)
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“It is important to remember that the erastes/eromenos
relationship was an idealized model for sexual contact between
males and that the realities of passions may have more closely
resembled the lusty comedies of Aristophanes. It is probably
erroneous to assume that intracrural intercourse the exclusive
form of intimacy between males among the ancient Greeks.”
(Mondimore, A Natural History of Homosexuality, p. 9)
“Among ancient Greeks, sexual contact between males of
the same social group was scrupulously concerned with status
and was played out according to rules that assured neither party
was degraded or open to accusations of licentiousness. The
idealized sexual partnership between men consisted of an active
older and a passive younger partner. While the older took
pleasure in the sexual act, the younger partner was not expected
to. The two roles were distinguished by having different labels;
the older partner was called the erastes and the younger the
eromenos.” (Mondimore, A Natural History of Homosexuality, p.
8)
“Though youths were taught to resist, they were also taught
that it was acceptable to yield to the worthy eremenos. They
could take it for granted that their taking on the roles of erastes
and later eromenos would be acceptable to their fathers and
uncles-as long as they followed the rules for playing those roles,
played their assigned role within the highly stylized pursuit-and-
flight pattern.” (Downing, Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love,
p. 139)
“The age of a beloved boy seems always to have been
between 12 and twenty.” (Flacelliere, Love in Ancient Greece, p.
68)
“As a rule the first sign of down on the chin of the beloved
deprived him of his lover.” (Flacelliere, Love in Ancient Greece, p.
68)
“As a rule the lover in these associations was a mature man
less than forty years of age.” (Flacelliere, Love in Ancient Greece,
p. 68)

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“When discussing the Greek love of boys, one thing
especially must not be forgotten: that it is never a question of
boys (as we mostly use the word), that is, of children of tender
age, but always of boys who are sexually mature, that is, who
have reached the age of puberty.” (Licht, Sexual Life in Ancient
Greece, p. 416)
“Paiderastia, the eroticized socialization of an adolescent
boy into Greek male society by an adult man (contrast Roman
boy-love), especially in the sixth and fifth century BCE
(Aristophanes; Homoeroticism; Sexual Attitudes). The
adolescent (11-18) was the eromenos (beloved, or paidika, kid);
the man (late 20s-early 30s) was the erastes (lover) perhaps the
boy’s maternal uncle (Bremmer 1983; Iolaus).” (Younger, Sex in
the Ancient World From A to Z, p. 91)
“The relationship would continue from its inception when
the boy was young (eleven years old, Straton) to the time when
he begins to get facial hair (Plutarch, Erotikos 770b-c) and is
inducted into the military, at age eighteen.” (Younger, Sex in the
Ancient World From A to Z, p. 92)
“However much the Greeks at all times approved of the
relation between man and youth that rested upon mutual liking,
they in the same manner rejected it if the boy sold himself for
money.” (Younger, Sex in the Ancient World From A to Z, p. 437)
“As we have seen in chapter 4, the most celebrated variety
of homoeroticism was a traditional social construct long before
the Classical period began. It was something men of the better
class did together apart from women of the better class. As
often in sexual relationships, there was an understood
distinction of roles; the older partner, the initiator and
aggressor, the active lover, or erastes, dominated the younger,
passive, modest eromenos. The role of the erastes was to
comport himself with moderation and restraint, whereas the
young eromenos was to display no sexual desire of his own,
reciprocating his lover’s eros with simple goodwill, philia. If he
accepted a lover’s attention he was perceived to grafify
(kharizesthai) his suitor out of gratitude (kharis) rather than
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sexual desire, but the gratitude was less for love of gives (never
for money) than for the older man’s time and attention. In
return for being gratified through intercrural sex (as in fig.
5.12), the older man would introduce the younger boy to adult
society and social skills; through this means the eromenos
would take his place in the male world of wellborn aristocrats,
the beautiful and good kalokagathoi. For the adolescent boy, it
was both an education in the customs of his class and a rite
passage to privileged society.” (Garrison, Sexual Culture in
Ancient Greece, p. 157)
“They were tied together in a pact equally compelling for
both. It was the obligation of the erastes always to be an
outstanding and impeccable example to the boy. He should not
commit any deed that would shame the boy. His total
responsibility to the boy made him dependent on the boy in
ways far beyond the purely erotic. He was judged by the
development and conduct of the boy. Even in regards to the
bodily aspect of the relationship the boy could assert himself
against his tutor.” (Vanggard, Phallos, A Symbol and Its History in
the Male World, p. 88)
“The relationship between erastes and eromenos was seen
as having an educational and moral function, to be apart the
youth’s initiation into full manhood. Therefore, it was a
disgrace not to be wooed -although also a shame to yield to
easily. The lover became responsible for the youth’s
development and honor. Because the more mature partner was
assumed to be motivated by true regard his beloved’s well-
being, and because what was wanted was love and consent not
simply sexual satisfaction, rape, fraud, or intimidation were
disallowed (indeed proof of coercion was grounds for
banishment). The two shared fame and shame.” (Downing,
Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love, p. 139)
“The relationship rarely continued (Male Homosexuality).
Both partners were expected to marry, the erastes soon after his
paiderastic relationship ceased. The eromenos thus could be the

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erastes of another eromenos (Peisistratos).” (Younger, Sex in the
Ancient World From A to Z, p. 92)
Greek Philosophers
A review of the surviving historical written records from the
three greatest philosophers, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle will
show that they regarded homosexual conduct as intrinsically
immoral. Therefore they would have rejected the idea of a
modern gay identity.
“All three of the greatest Greek philosophers, Socrates,
Plato, and Aristotle, regarded homosexual conduct intrinsically
immoral. All three rejected the linchpin of modern gay ideology
and lifestyle.
At the heart of the Platonic-Aristotelian and later ancient
philosophical rejections of all homosexual conduct, and thus of
the modern gay ideology, are three fundamental theses: (1) The
commitment of a man and a woman to each other in the sexual
union of marriage is intrinsically good and reasonable, and is
incompatible with sexual relations outside of marriage. (2)
Homosexual acts are radically and peculiarly non-martial, and
for that reason intrinsically unreasonable and unnatural. (3)
Furthermore, according to Plato, if not Aristolte, homosexual
acts have a special similarity to solitary masturbation, and both
types of radically non-martial act are manifestly unworthy of the
human being and immoral.” (Finnis, Law, Morality, and Sexual
Orientation, p. 33)
“Philosophers such as Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle
expressed this attitude in a more radical form, and consequently
were only prepared to accept pederastic relationships in their
nonsexual form. Thus they attempted at least theoretically to
put an end to the ancient tendency to sexually abuse boys and
youths.” (Detel, translated by David Wigg-Wolf, Foucault and
Classical Antiquity Power, Ethics and Knowledge, p. 135)
Plato
“But Plato at least understood the myth to finger Liaus as
the inventor of homosexuality. In the Laws, the Athenian
Stranger, tacking the difficult problem of regulating sexual
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passion, the cause of myriad evils both for the individual and
whole states, says that following nature legislators should make
the law as was before Liaus, when sex with men and youths as
though they were women (a reference no doubt to sodomy)
was forbidden on the model of animals, which Plato mistakenly
believed restricted sex to procreation. Plato sees the state of
nature as one where homosexuality does not exist, sex between
males thus being an unnatural invocation whose origin is Laius.
This would be consistent with Peisandros, who calls Laius’s
passion a lawless eros, lawless in the sense of contrary to natural
law, an interpretation supported by another epithet Peisandros
uses, atheniton, which means lawless in the sense of contrary to
established customs, the unwritten laws handed down by the
gods before history, not those legislated by men. Nor is Plato’s
view of homosexuality as unnatural merely a consequence of his
old age. In the earlier Phadrus, one of the great encomia to
pederasty, he likewise calls same-sex gratification lawless and
criticizies the lesser soul that cannot see the form of beauty in a
handsome boy and so is not ashamed to pursue pleasure against
nature.
Homosexuality, then, to the Greeks is a historical
invocation, a result of the depraved human imagination and
vulnerability to pleasure.” (Thorton, Eros: The Myth of Ancient
Greek Sexuality, p. 102)
“The pederastic milieu of the gymnasium, where young men
exercised naked, was considered a Spartan invention, along with
the innovation of rubbing olive oil on the body before
exercising, to protect the skin but also no doubt to increase the
athlete’s erotic allure. Plato’s Athenian Stranger indulges these
culture stereotypes when he holds the Dorians responsible for
corrupt[ing] the pleasures of sex which are according to nature,
not just for men but for beasts. Again Plato see homosexuality
as a historical phenomenon, an enormity arising out of the
inability to control a pleasure defined as against nature because
it is its own end rather than serving the goal of procreation.
Later in the Laws he again condemns homosexuality, along with
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adultery and heterosexual sodomy, on the grounds of being not
according to nature because it does not lead to procreation.”
(Thorton, Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality, p. 103)
“Plato’s distaste for homosexuality is shared by his
contemporary Xenophen, a great admirer of the Spartans who
is anxious to resolve them of their traditional responsibility for
legitimizing homosexuality. The mythical lawgiver of Sparta,
Lcyurgus, Xenophon tells us, forbade physical intimacy
between the boy and his admirer, categorizing homosexuality
with other crimes like incest. Like Plato, Xenophon considers
sexual relations between men a depravity that all right-thinking
men should abhor as much as they would incest.” (Thorton,
Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality, p. 103)
Aristotle
“Although Aristotle, as we saw, implies the Dorians
invented homosexuality, elsewhere he recognizes that
homosexuals can be born as well as made. Either way, though,
they are a deviation from the norm. While discussing the
Nichomachean Ethics why some unpleasant or disgusting
practices are pleasurable, he says that some diseased things
result from nature or habit, and he instances pulling out one’s
hair, nail-biting, eating coals or earth, and sex between males.
The latter, he notes, often results from childhood sexual abuse.
Such persons are no more unrestrained in their sexual behavior,
than a woman, whether they are made that way by nature or the
disease of habit. Despite Aristotle’s tolerant and objective tone,
homosexuality is still characterized as a disease (nosematodie), a
compulsive, unpleasant, and destructive behavior akin to
manias like eating dirt or chewing one’s fingernails. Even
pederasty, that supposedly accepted institution of the city-state,
is here seen as possibly contributing to what Aristotle considers
a morbid condition. Today’s kinaidos is yesterday’s eromenos
or boy-favorite.” (Thorton, Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek
Sexuality, p. 104)
“The Aristotelian corpus offers other evidence for the belief
that homosexuality results from a physiological deformity
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brought about by either nature or habit. A bizarre passage from
the Problems explains why a man would find pleasure in being
anally penetrated-obviously in the Greek mind a disturbing
anomaly, needing some explanation. Starting from the
assumption that every form of excretion has a region in the
body from which it is secreted, the write explains that the
passive homosexual, due to some damage to the ducts that take
semen to the testicles and penis, is unnaturally constituted and
so has semen collect in his anus. This damage could be a result
of an inborn deformity or childhood sexual abuse. The
collected fluid caused by desire, a desire that cannot be gratified
because there is no way to discharged the accumulated semen.
Hence the catamite seeks out anal intercourse in order to relieve
the swelling. The writer goes on to note that boys subjected to
anal intercourse will become habituated to it, thus associating
pleasure with the act. Environment and childhood experience
play a major role in creating the passive homosexual by
deforming the body.” (Thorton, Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek
Sexuality, p. 104-105)
3. Age Structured Homosexuality: Greek Pederasty
Although this article is included in the section of age-
structured homosexuality, its scope is broader in that it
addresses more than Greek pederasty. It discusses Greek
sexuality in general, adult homosexual, and compares our
modern western society to that of ancient Greece.
What, then, can we conclude about homosexuality in the
modern American culture if one only listens to those on the
political left, from those on the political right, or from the
various court cases? One may find a fourth view when the issue
of homosexuality is on a ballot up for vote. Two contradictory
outcomes have been the result depending on whether the
question has been an issue of discrimination or the definition of
marriage. In an overwhelming majority of times when the vote
has been to change the definition of marriage to include same-
sex couples the results have been not to change the historical
definition of marriage of one man and one woman. There have
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been more favorable outcomes when the question is
discrimination against homosexuals. So, then our modern
American culture view of homosexuality is very similar to that
of ancient Greece as seen in the following quotes by historians
David Cohen and Bruce Thornton.
“What, then, is one to conclude about a culture whose laws
expressed a deep-rooted anxiety about pederasty while not
altogether forbidding it? A culture in which attitudes and values
ranged from the differing modes of approbation represented in
Plato’s Symposium to the stark realism of Aristophanes and the
judgment of Aristotle that homosexuality is a diseased or
morbid state acquired by habit and comparable to biting
fingernails or habitually eating earth or ashes? A culture is not a
homogeneous unity; there was no one “Athenian attitude”
towards homoeroticism. The widely differing attitudes and
conflicting norms and practices which have been discussed
above represent the disagreements, contradictions and anxieties
which make up the patterned chaos of a complex culture. They
should not be rationalized away. To make them over into a
neatly coherent and internally consistent system would only
serve to diminish our understanding of the “many-hued” nature
of Athenian homosexuality.” (Cohen, Law, Society and
Homosexuality, in Classical Athens, p. 21)
“What, then, is one to conclude about a culture whose laws
expressed a deep rooted anxiety about pederasty while not
altogether forbidding it. A culture in which attitudes and values
range from the differing modes of approbation represented in
Plato’s Symposium to the stark realism of Aristophanes and the
judgment of Aristotle, that in a man, the capacity to feel
pleasure in a passive sexual role is a diseased or morbid state,
acquired by habit, and comparable to biting fingernails or
habitually eating earth or ashes. A culture is not a homogeneous
unity; there was no one Athenian attitude towards
homoeroticism. The widely differing attitudes and conflicting
norms and practices which have been discussed above
represent the disagreements, contradictions, and anxieties
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which make up the patterned chaos of a complex culture. They
should not be rationalized away. To make them over into a
nearly coherent and internally consistent system would only
serve to diminish our understanding of the many-hued nature
of Athenian homosexuality.” (Cohen, Law, Sexuality, and Society:
The Enforcement of Morals in Classical Athens, p. 201-202).
“First, most of the writing on ancient sexuality these days
grinds the evidence in the mill of an advocacy agenda supported
by some fashionable theory that says more about the crisis of
Western rationalism than it does about ancient Greece. Thus
we are told that the Greeks saw nothing inherently wrong with
sodomy between males as long as certain protocols of age,
social status, and position were honored, an interpretation
maintained despite the abundance of evidence, detailed below
in Chapter 4, that the Greeks-including pederastic apologists
like Plato-were horrified and disgusted by the idea of male
being anal ling penetrated by another male and called such
behavior against nature. One purpose here is to get back to
what the Greeks actually say without burying it in polysyllabic
sludge.” (Thornton, Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality, p.
xiii)
Sex was viewed as directional, and having two roles,
active and passive
While this article is written to discuss the homosexuality,
specifically Greek pederasty, a discussion of how the Greek’s
saw sexuality must be understood. In our modern
understanding of sexuality, except in cases of abuse such as
rape, the partners are equals. But this was not the case in
ancient Greece. First there was a fundamental inequity in favor
of the free male in relationship to boys, women and slaves.
Secondly this resulted in sex having a directional quality, with
an anatomic imperative, again in favor of the free male. Sex was
something he did to someone else and what he used to do it
with, his male sex organ, the penis. Thirdly, sex had
active/passive roles, one partner was the penetrator and the

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second partner was penetrated. Thus, the ancient Greeks may
be seen as having a greater acceptance for bisexuality.
“For the ancients, many historians agree, sexuality was not a
separate realm of experience, the core of private life; instead it
was directly linked to social power and status. People were
judged by public behavior, for which there were clear roles;
marriage, for instance, was a duty that bore no necessary
relationship to erotic satisfaction. Socially powerful males
(citizens) enjoyed sexual access to almost all other members of
the society (including, in Greece, enslaved males, younger free
males, foreigners, and women of all classes).” (Clausen, Beyond
Gay or Straight, p. 51)
First, the expression of sexuality was centered on a
fundamental inequity, not only in male-female relationships, but
also between male partners in a homosexual relationship.”
(King, Sowing the Field: Greek and Roman Sexology, p. 29 in Sexual
Knowledge Sexual Science: The History of the Attitudes in Sexuality,
editors Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich)
“In Greece the sexual relationship was assumed to be a
power relationship, where one participant is dominate and the
other inferior. On one side stands the free adult male; on the
other, women, slaves, and boys. Sexual roles are isomorphic
with social roles; indeed, sexual behavior is seen as a reflection
of social relationship not as itself the dominant theme. Thus it
is important for us to remember that for the Greeks it was
one’s role, not one’s gender, that was salient. Sexual objects
come in two different kinds not male and female but active and
passive.” (Downing, Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love, p. 135-
136)
“In the late twentieth century it became fashionable to
assume that penile penetration expressed the power of the
penetrator and subordination of the penetrated (Foucault,
1976/80-1984/6; Keuls, 1985; Parker, 1992). Many studies then
concluded, rightly I feel, that men had sexual access to all those
beneath them in society (unmarried females, non-citizen males,
slaves; Richlin, 1992, p. xviii; Sutton, 1992, p. 5); only proper
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women and citizen males were off limits.” (Younger, Sex in the
Ancient World From A to Z, p. xiv)
“Although sexual pleasure and marriage were not
necessarily linked, sexuality and domination most certainly
were. Far from being a mutual experience, sexual activity always
had a directional quality for the Greeks. Sex was something one
did to someone, and anatomic imperative dictated that it was a
man (or more precisely the penis) that did the doing.”
(Mondimore, A Natural History of Homosexuality, p. 7)
“In both Greece and Rome, as the most recent studies have
correctly argued, the fundamental opposition between different
types of sexual behaviour was not the heterosex/homosexual
contrast, but the active/passive contrast, the former category
activity being characteristic of the adult male, while the latter
passivity was reserved for women and boys.” (Cantarella,
Bisexuality in the Ancient World, p. x)
“The ancient world, both Greek and Roman, did not base
its classification on gender, but on a completely different axis,
that of active versus passive. This has one immediate and
important consequence, which we must face in the beginning.
Simply put, there was no such emic, cultural abstraction as
homosexuality in the ancient world. The fact that a man had sex
with other men did not determine his sexual category. Equally,
it must be emphasized, there was no such concept as
heterosexuality. The application of these terms to the ancient
world is anachronistic and can lead to serious
misunderstandings. By the fifth time one has made the
qualification, The passive homosexual was not rejected for his
homosexuality but for his passivity, it ought to become clear
that we are talking not about homosexuality but about
passivity.” (Parker, The Teratogenic Grid, p. 47-48 in Roman
Sexualities, editors Judith P. Hallett and Marilyn B. Skinner)
“As we remarked earlier, the Greeks showed a pronounced
tendency to attach greatest importance to (indeed, to glorify)
the sexual instinct itself rather than the particular object;
consequently they were much freer than modern men to vary
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sexual objects on their relative merits. Greek culture, unlike
modern cultures, imposed on adult males no limitations as to
the choice of sexual objects per se, and the only perversions
remarked by the comic poets (reflecting, we may be sure,
community opinion) are cases in which sexual acts other than
vaginal intercourse, otherwise perfectly acceptable, are pursed
to excess (see Cratin, p. 152, for example) or practiced in an
inappropriate setting.” (Henderson, The Maculate Muse, p. 205)
“The third, closely related, feature is the importance of
penetration; the main distinction in all sexual encounters, heter-
or homosexual, was presented as being between penetrator and
penetrated.” (King, Sowing the Field: Greek and Roman Sexology, p.
30 in Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science: The History of the Attitudes to
Sexuality, editors Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich)
“The Greeks associated sexual desire closely with other
human appetites the desire for food, drink, and sleep and saw
all these appetites as entailing the same moral problem, the
problem of avoiding excess.” (Downing, Myths and Mysteries of
Same-Sex Love, p. 134)
“The Greek sexual ethic emphasized not what one did but
how one did it; it involved not an index of particular forbidden
acts but an inculcation to act with moderation.” (Downing,
Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love, p. 135)
Homosexuality in Ancient Greece
“The ancient Greek and Latin languages have no word that
can be translated as homosexual, largely because these societies
did not have the same sexual categories that we do. Our
concepts and categories of sexual expression are based on the
genders of the two partners involved: heterosexuality when the
partners are of the opposite sex, and homosexuality when the
partner are of the same sex. In other times and among other
peoples, this way of thinking about people simply doesn’t seem
to apply-anthropologists, historians, and sociologists have
described many cultures in which same-sex eroticism occupies a
very different place than it does in our own.” (Mondimore, A
Natural History of Homosexuality, p. 3-4)
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“Both of these explanations for homosexuality-as either an
unnatural perversion of sex and an excessive expression of its
essential nature-can be found in ancient Greek literary remains.
Choosing one of the two to the exclusion of the other, which is
often the practice among modern scholars, oversimplifies the
complexity of the attitudes attested in the evidence.” (Thorton,
Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality, p. 101)
“Ancient Greece is often cited as an example of a
civilization in which homosexuality was accepted as normal,
even encouraged. This is not quite true. All males were
expected to make love to women, to marry, and to sire a family,
whether or they had a male lover or not. Moreover, love and
sex between adult males was thought to be a bit ridiculous. The
norm was for an adult male to have a relationship that lasted
several years with an adolescent boy. When the boy reached
maturity, he, then, was also expected to take a young lover.”
(Goode, Deviant Behavior, p. 193-194)
“Homosexuality was a universally recognized sexual option
throughout the ancient world, particularly in Dorian areas,
where it seems to have had a religious, ethical, and legal
sanction and to have been more a part of man’s everyday public
life than was the case in Athens.” (Henderson, The Maculate
Muse, p. 204)
“The second feature is more applicable to classical Greece
culture. Male homosexual activity was, to some extent, seen as
normal, but only if it was kept within certain clearly defined
social parameters. Relationships between equals in age were
frown upon. In classical Athens, homosexual relationships
ideally had some features of an initiation rite, between a young,
beardless boy and an older mentor. However, even such
relationships were hedged round with etiquette regarding the
process of courtship and the giving and receiving of gifts and
other signals, while a deep-rooted anxiety about pederasty was
expressed in classical Athenian law. Aristotle argues that any
enjoyment of what he saw as the subordinate, defeated role of
the passive partner in a homoerotic relationship was unnatural;
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on Athenian vase-paintings, the passive partner is never showed
with an erection. The Athenian figure of the kinaidos, the man
who actually enjoys the passive role, is presented as a scare-
figure, both socially and sexually deviant.” (King, Sowing the
Field: Greek and Roman Sexology, p. 30 in Sexual Knowledge, Sexual
Science: The History of the Attitudes to Sexuality, editors Roy Porter
and Mikulas Teich)
“Both of these explanations of homosexuality-as either an
unnatural perversion of sex or an excessive expression of its
essential nature-can be found in ancient Greek literary remains.
Choosing one of the two to the exclusion of the other, which is
often the practice among modern scholars, oversimplifies the
complexity of attitudes attested in the evidence.” (Thorton,
Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality, p. 101)
“The ambiguity and complexity of Greek attitudes toward
homosexuality can be seen first in the various speculations
about its origins, which oscillate between the poles of culture
and nature. Whatever its source, though, habitual, passive
homosexuality is clearly considered an aberration, a disorder
linked to violence and disease, even the supposedly accepted
institution of pederasty.” (Thorton, Eros: The Myth of Ancient
Greek Sexuality, p. 101-102)
“Whether the origins of homosexuality are to be found in
nature or history, though, it clearly is problematic, even in its
presumably accepted forms of pederasty, a phenomenon
needing to be accounted for mythically in the crime of Laius.”
(Thorton, Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality, p. 103)
“One of our difficulties when reading about ancient Greece
is that the most common manifestation of homosexuality in the
evidence concerns pederasty, the quasi-ritualized, transient,
physical and emotional relationship between an older male and
a youth, an activity we view as criminal. Very little, if any,
evidence from ancient Greece survives that shows adult males
(or females) as couples; involved in an ongoing, reciprocal
sexual and emotional relationship in which sex with women (or
men) is moot and the age difference is no more significant than
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it is in heterosexual relationships. Thus the evidence from
ancient Greece involves either man-youth homosexuality (the
idealized social relationship we will discuss in Chapter 8), or
more precisely defined passive homosexual or kinaidos, the
adult male who perversely enjoys being penetrated by other
males and who has sex with women only because of societal
pressure. These two categories, as we will see, are not as
mutually exclusive as they might appear, which accounts for the
anxiety tingeing even the most enthusiastic ancient celebrators
of pederasty.” (Thorton, Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek
Sexuality, p. 100)
“In the first place it appears extremely likely that
homosexuality of any kind was confined to prosperous and
aristocratic levels of ancient society. The masses of peasants
and artisans were probably scarcely affected by habits of this
kind, which seem to have been associated with a sort of
snobbery.” (Flacelliere, Love in Ancient Greece, p. 62)
“In Athens, for a boy to have a homosexual relationship
with an adult was considered not only acceptable, but also,
under certain conditions, socially approved.” (Cantarella,
Bisexuality in the Ancient World, p. 17)
“By the time Athens entered period of her greatest power in
480 B.C., male homosexual practices were undoubtedly
common and socially tolerated, but were they sanctioned? The
age of pederastic innocence was over and a certain anxiety
about the subject can be traced in art and literature. The
misgivings expressed over male homosexuality usually
concerned either homosexual prostitution or the possibility of
homoerotic relations between peers.” (Keuls, The Reign of the
Phallus Sexual Politics in Ancient Greece, p. 287)
“The above outline of the homosexual ethos in Athens
shows that it underwent a fundamental change between the
Archaic and the Classical ages. The archetypal homosexual
relationship was that between a childlike or prepubescent boy
and a mature man. The contact had strong paternal overtones,
and it involved affectionate response from the child partner and
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mild sexual response from the pubescent partner. The original
image of the ideal beloved did not include any feminine traits.
In general, the sexual approach was frontal and the copulation
intracrural.
The period when this pattern took shape was the Archaic
age of Athens, before the greatest flowering of Attic culture.
During the fifth and fourth centuries this patterned became
compromised and led to male prostitution by citizens and to
adult male love affairs; both of these practices were consistently
stigmatized as socially unacceptable. Anal sex, generally
associated with obscenity and coarse behavior, were the
common form these discredited types of homosexual contact.”
(Keuls, The Reign of the Phallus Sexual Politics in Ancient Greece, p.
298-299)
“This was especially so if the youth allowed himself to be
penetrated, an act considered unworthy of a man and a free
citizen, and one which could threaten his citizenship.” (Bishop
and Osthelder, Sexualia From Prehistory to Cyberspace, p. 208)
“The situation was totally different in the case of grown
equals, however. Whereas the Dorian boy would attain
manhood through his submission, the grown man who
submitted to another man would lose his manliness and
become effeminate, exposed to shame and scorn.” (Vanggard,
Phallos: A Symbol and Its History in the Male World, p. 89)
“Regardless of actual behavior patterns, anal copulation
between two males was equated with sex between two adults,
not between a mature man and a young boy, and it was
obviously not approved.” (Keuls, The Reign of the Phallus Sexual
Politics in Ancient Greece, p. 291)
“Homosexuality, then, to the Greeks is a historical
innovation, a result of the depraved human imagination and
vulnerability to pleasure.” (Thornton, Eros: The Myth of Ancient
Greek Sexuality, p. 102)
“Already in 1964 Dover sounded the themes of his later
publications: the centrality of Athenian law-court speeches; due
attention to painted pottery; distinctions of genre, context,
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class, between beliefs and behaviors; the tendentious use of
terms of personal abuse (such as prostitute) in political
propaganda; and above all, the contrast between the older,
active erastes and his passive junior partner in a homosexual
pair, the eromenos. These Dover saw as essentially two stages
in the social development of a Greek citizen rather than as life-
long identities.” (Golden and Toohey, editors, Sex and Difference
in Ancient Greece and Rome, p. 6-7)
Kinaidos
In ancient Greece, there is one particular adult male who is
identified with homosexual behavior. The Greeks had a name
for this individual, kinaidos. This individual was the one who
took the passive receptive role in the male homosexual
behavior of anal intercourse.
In doing so by being willing to take the passive, submissive
role he was seen as unworthy to be a free man, and more like a
male prostitute. As a result, forfeited his right as a citizen to
hold office. The man who would allow himself to be anally
penetrated it was thought would also subject himself to the
abuse of alcohol, eating, money, or power.
“Another male image, the kinaidos, was totally negative.
This was the man who was represented as acting in an
effeminate fashion, by implication taking the passive role in sex
because he could not control his appetites. The male prostitute
or kinaidos was very different from our modern notion of the
homosexual. The male prostitute was not expelled from society
because, like the female prostitute, he provided a sexual service,
albeit a shameful one. A man was not seen as born a kinaidos
or male prostitute-it was a role he acquired.” (Clark, Desire: A
History of European Sexuality, p. 22)
“What we find is the kinaidos as emblem of unrestrained
compulsive sexual appetite, of surrender to the chaos of natural
passion that threatens civilized order, a traitor to his sex, a
particularity offensive manifestation of eross power over the
masculine mind that is responsible for creating and maintaining

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that order in the face of nature’s chaos.” (Thorton, Eros: The
Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality, p. 101)
“But in nearly every genre of Greek literature the kinaidos’s
appetite is sterile, useless, good only for pleasure, rendering the
male prone to other appetites, for money or power, that also
threaten culture and its discriminating categories, particularly if
he is a citizen responsible in some measure for the political
functioning of the city.” (Thorton, Eros: The Myth of Ancient
Greek Sexuality, p. 101)
“The situation was totally different in the case of grown
equals, however. Whereas the Dorian boy would attain
manhood through his submission, the grown man who
submitted to another man would lose his manliness and
become effeminate, exposed to shame and scorn.” (Vanggard,
Phallos: A Symbol and Its History in the Male World, p. 89)
“Once we have accepted the universality of homosexual
relations in Greek society as a fact, it surprises us to learn that if
a man had at any time in his life prostituted himself to another
man for money he was debarred from exercising his political
rights.” (Dover, Classical Greek Attitudes to Sexual Behavior, p.
122-123 in Sex and Difference in Ancient Greece and Rome, editors
Mark Golden and Peter Toohey)
“In so far as the passive partner in a homosexual act takes
upon himself the role of a woman, he was open to the
suspicion, like the male prostitute, that he abjured his
prescribed role as a future solider and defender of the
community.” (Dover, Classical Greek Attitudes to Sexual Behavior,
p. 125 in Sex and Difference in Ancient Greece and Rome, editors
Mark Golden and Peter Toohey)
“As a rule, the only sexual practice attacked as a demeaning
perversity is passive anal sex by men¸ the wide-asses
(euryproktoi) who willingly submit to another man’s
assertiveness. In this society, any form of submissiveness was
considered unworthy of a free man. While all understood that a
woman is naturally to be penetrated by a man, it was considered

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only for a slave or male prostitute to submit in this way to
another male.” (Garrison, Sexual Culture in Ancient Greece, p. 161)
“A man who enjoys playing the receptive partner is
derogated as a prostitute and as having forfeited his right as a
citizen to hold office. The assumption is that a man who would
willingly make himself available would do anything! Only slaves,
women, and foreigners would willingly choose to be treated as
objects.” (Downing, Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love, p. 139)
“Whether created by history or nature, childhood sexual
abuse or deformed seminal ducts, the man who enjoys anal
penetration by another man is an aberration, a volatile locus of
potential social disorder that like the woman he resembled must
be dealt with.” (Thorton, Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek
Sexuality, p. 105)
“The protocols explain why. Since sexual activity is
symbolic of (or constructed as) zero-sum competition and the
restless conjunction of win, the kinaidos is a man who desires
to lose. Contrary to all social junctions prescribing the necessity
of men to exercise their desires in a way that shows mastery
over self and others, the kinaidos simply and directly desires to
be mastered.” (Winkler, Laying Now the Law: The Oversight of
Men’s Sexual Behavior in Classical Athens, p. 186 in Before Sexuality:
The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World,
editors David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler and Froma I.
Zeitlin)
Pederasty
After discussing how the Greek’s viewed sex in general, and
specifically homosexuality, along with the kinaidos, the man
who is the passive receptive partner in anal intercourse we now
will discuss the Greek practice of pederastry, the love of boys.
Ideally pederasty did not have a sexual component, but was a
rite of passage and an educational mode for an adult male (not a
biological father) to take on the role of mentor for a young
male entering puberty, growing and maturing into an adult
male, who as a free male citizen was to be a political leader in
the Greek city-state. Pederasty served the role for the moral and
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political formation of young men. More importantly it was not
a private affair between two individuals but was a public affair
for the benefit of all.
“The word pederasty is derived from the Greek
paiderasteia, literally meaning the love of boys. In English
pederasty has come to signify almost exclusively the practice of
sexual inversion. But in Greek literature paiderasteia is used to
refer to both to pure, disinterested affection and to physical
homosexual relations.” (Flacelliere, Love in Ancient Greece, p. 62)
“In the Greek language the word paederasty had not this
ugly sound it has for us to-day, since it was regarded simply as
an expression for one variety of love, and had no sort of
defamatory meaning attached to it.” (Licht, Sexual Life in Ancient
Greece, p. 413)
“I hope that sufficient documentary evidence has been
given to show that paiderasty was cultivated by heterosexually
normal men in ancient Greece, where it did not presuppose an
inversely homosexual type of personality. It was not considered
a transgression, to be tolerated, nor was it felt to betoken to any
laxity in moral standards; it was a natural part of the life-style of
the best of men, reflected in the stories of the gods and heroes
of the people.” (Vanggard, Phallos: A Symbol and Its History in the
Male World, p. 32)
“Paiderasty served the highest goal education (paideia). Eros
was the medium of paideia, uniting tutor and pupil. The boy
submitted and let himself be taken in the possession of the
man.” (Vanggard, Phallos: A Symbol and Its History in the Male
World, p. 87)
“But it was only after the formation of the city that the
Greeks took to loving other men, and more particularly boys?
Male homosexuality in Greece, in fact or at least its most
socially and culturally significant forms was, in practice,
pederasty, and was extremely widespread. The problem if its
origins remains open.” (Cantarella, Bisexuality in the Ancient
World, p. 4)

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Physiognomy
“The pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomy similarly describes
the effects of passive homosexuality on the body: The
effeminate man is drooping-eyed, knock = kneed, his head
hanging on one shoulder, his hands carried upturned and
flabby. He wriggles his loins as he walks, or tries not to, and he
looks furtively. Both these passages, like the ones in Plato, see
homosexuality as a deformed condition brought about by a
natural disorder or by habit-something, in short, abnormal, not
quite the practice accepted by and fully integrated into society
that some modern scholars believe it to be.” (Thorton, Eros: The
Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality, p. 105)
Greek Laws
Also, there are written records of legal provisions regulating
various forms of homoerotic behavior. These legal provisions
may be may be grouped into three categories. The first group
has been mentioned before, legal provisions surrounding male
prostitution. The male lost the right to address the Assembly
and to participate in other areas of civil life if he engaged in
homosexual intercourse for gain. These legal provisions against
male prostitution also applied to pederasty. A second group
addressed laws relating to education and courtship. General
provisions concerning sexual assault comprised the third group
of laws that may apply to all sexual behavior, whether it was
heterosexual or homosexual in nature.
Concerning pederasty itself, numerous laws addressed it,
and in various ways throughout Greece. Because it was mostly
limited to the ruling class and therefore for the most part
socially acceptable in practical terms the laws were rarely
enforced. Except in cases where within the ruling class they
were used to gain political advantage in disputes.
“But in Greece, though pederasty was forbidden by law in
most cities, it had become so fashionable that no one troubled
to conceal it. On the contrary, such tendencies were respected
and even approved.” (Flacelliere, Love in Ancient Greece, p. 63)

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“We are clearly in a different realm from the romantic
pursuit of young men in their teens by young men in their
twenties known as paederasty, an activity well illustrated on
Athenian vases of the late sixth and early fifth centuries B.C.E.
and portrayed in Plato’s dialogues as an experience sometimes
heartbreaking, sometimes delicious, but always of general
interest and approval. In paederasty, as Dover, Golden, and
Foucault have carefully demonstrated, a variety of conventions
combined to protect the junior partner from the stigma of
effeminacy, of being a kinaidos.” (Winkler, Laying Now the Law:
The Oversight of Men’s Sexual Behavior in Classical Athens, p. 186 in
Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient
Greek World, editors David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler and
Froma I. Zeitlin)
“As Dover has aptly observed (1978, 88 f.), the same kind
of two-faced morality must have governed homosexual
seduction that controls heterosexual relations in most societies;
pursuit and seduction are sanctioned, the yielding to seduction
is not. Athens went to great lengths to protect its handsome
young sons from men preying on their beauty; stringent
measures were built into the legal system to prevent boys from
falling into prostitution. However since love gifts and social
favors were part of the pederastic pattern, it must have been
difficult to determine exactly at which point prostitution
began.” (Keuls, The Reign of the Phallus Sexual Politics in Ancient
Greece, p. 296)
“All the same, at Athens, a whole body of laws existed for
the purpose of restraining the spread of pederasty. This
legislation probably dated back to the time of Solon. It aimed
among many other things at keeping male lovers out the
schools and exercising arenas so far as possible. (See Aeschines,
Against Timarchus, 9-11.) But laws can do very little to
suppress widely disseminated and inveterate habits.”
(Flacelliere, Love in Ancient Greece, p. 67)
“The available evidence points to a certain Athenian
nervousness regarding all types of homosexual encounters.
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Solon’s laws concerning homosexuality, for which our chief
source is Aeschines speech Against Timarchus, attempted to
regulate its practice and to protect Athenian citizens from
sexual abuses: slaves could not indulge in homosexuality
willingly or unwillingly or frequent the palaestras; free persons
could not be prostituted or violated; and fathers were
encouraged to protect their sons from seduction by employing
guardians to watch out for their best interests, at least until they
reached an age at which they could make intelligent decisions
regarding the conduct of their lives.” (Henderson, The Maculate
Muse, p. 204-205)
“From Aeschines speech it is possible to perceive
something of the code of behavior that surrounded the carrying
out of such affairs. Love affairs between men and boys or
between grown men could, depending on the circumstances, be
licentious and depraved or noble and chaste. If a man
conducted the affair high-mindedly, without any kind of
payment and out of proper regard for his lover’s beauty and ...,
then no one could blame him for satisfying his desires. But if a
man prostituted himself for payment or made a habit of
surrendering his body or pursuing young men for purely
sensual purposes, than he could legitimately be called to
account for lewdness.” (Henderson, The Maculate Muse, p. 205)
“An important turning-point is indicated by the name of
Solon (Aeschines, Tim., 138; Charicles, ii, p. 262 ff.), who,
himself a homosexual, issues important laws for the regulation
of paederasty, providing in the first place, especially, that a slave
might not have connection with a free-born boy. This shows
two things: first, that paedophilla was recognized in Athens by
the legislator, and secondly that the legislator did not consider
the feeling of superiority of the free born to be diminished by
intimate relations with a slaves. Further, laws were issued
(Aeschines, Tim., 13-15) which were intended to protect free-
born youths from abuse during their minority. Another law
deprived those of their civic rights who incited free boys to
offer their charms for sale professionally; for prostitution has
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nothing to do with paedophilla, of which we are speaking here,
and in which we must rather think always only of a voluntary
relationship that is based upon mutual affection.” (Licht, Sexual
Life in Ancient Greece, p. 452-453)
“Solon, the famous lawgiver and chief archon at Athens in
594/3 B.C., is alleged to have instituted two pieces of moral
legislation in Athens pertaining to homosexuality in the
gymnasium. The first prohibits slaves from activities of the
gymnasium and from having freeborn slaves as lovers.”
(Scanlon, Eros and Greek Athletics, p. 212)
“A second Solonian law, this probably dating to the late
fifth century, prescribes hours for opening and closing schools
and palaestrae to discourage homosexual liaisons from taking
place there in the dark or without the presence of the proper
supervisors.” (Scanlon, Eros and Greek Athletics, p. 213)
“The Athenians themselves were not unaware of these
ambiguities and contradictions. To begin with: according to the
Xenophon, Greeks were well aware of that laws and customs
regarding pederasty varied widely between different states.
Some prohibited it outright, others explicitly permitted it. In the
Symposium Plato put into the mouth of Pausanias an
econcomium of love which explicitly addresses the conflicts
within Athenian norms and customs pertaining to pederasty.
Whereas for the rest of Greece these laws and customs are clear
and well defined, explains Pausanias, those of Sparta are
poikilos, intricate, complicated, subtle. He comments that
Athenian legislation in this are is admirable, but difficult to
understand; the difficulty consists in the simultaneous
approbation and censure which social norms and legal rules
attach to the pursuit of a pederastic courtship.” (Cohen, Law,
Society and Homosexuality in Classical Athens, p. 152 in Sex and
Difference in Ancient Greece and Rome, editors Mark Golden and
Peter Toohey)
“The legal provisions regulating various forms of
homoerotic behaviour may be grouped in three categories: laws
relating to prostitution; laws relating to education and
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courtship; and finally, general provision concerning sexual
assault. These are only categories of convenience, however, and
there can be considerable overlap between them. The laws
concerning male prostitution may be considered first. One
statue partially disenfranchised any Athenian citizen who
prostituted himself, whether as a boy or as an adult; he lost his
right to address the Assembly and to participate in other
important areas of civic life. Secondly, if a boy was hired out for
sexual services by his father, brother, uncle or guardian, they
were subject to a public action, as was the man who hired him.
Thirdly, a general statue prohibited procuring and applied any
free-born child or woman.” (Cohen, Law, Society and
Homosexuality in Classical Athens, p. 153 in Sex and Difference in
Ancient Greece and Rome, editors Mark Golden and Peter Toohey)
“The second category of laws pertained to education and set
out a series of detailed prohibitions designed, among other
things, to protect schoolboys from erotic attentions of older
males. These laws regulated all the contacts which boys had
with adult males during the period at school, and provided for
an appointment of public officials to ensure that proper order
was maintained. According to Aeschines, the law forbade the
schools to open before sunrise or to stay open after dark, and
strictly regulated who might enter and under what
circumstances. Finally, another law prohibited slaves from
courting free boys.” (Cohen, Law, Society and Homosexuality in
Classical Athens, p. 153-154 in Sex and Difference in Ancient Greece
and Rome, editors Mark Golden and Peter Toohey)
“The third kind of statutory prohibition is rather more
problematical than the first two and has received scant attention
in regard to regulation of homoerotic conduct. Here I referto
the law of hubris (outrage or abuse). Current scholarship on
pederasty commonly asserts that there was no law prohibiting
an Athenian male from consummating a sexual relationship
with a free boy without using force or payment. This point is
usually adduced as the cornerstone of the standard
interpretation. This interpretation ignores, however, a series of
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questions concerning the legal context of pederastic sexuality
which, to my knowledge has never been asked. Did the
Athenian law acknowledge an age of consent in its
conceptualization of sexual assault and seduction? If the
consent of the boy was not a bar to prosecution, did any
consummated sexual relationship with a boy fulfill the required
elements of the offence? Did Athenian law have some notion
equivalent to statutory rape in modern legal systems, where
consent is the crucial issue in definition of rape offenses? An
affirmative answer to any of these questions would require one
to reassess the standard view that the active role in pederastic
relationships was absolutely free from any taint of
disapprobation.” (Cohen, Law, Society and Homosexuality in
Classical Athens, p. 154 in Sex and Difference in Ancient Greece and
Rome, editors Mark Golden and Peter Toohey)
“The set of legal norms embodied in these statues reflects a
social order which encompassed a profound ambivalence and
anxiety in regard to male-male sexuality; a social order which
recognized the existence and persistence of such behaviour, but
was deeply concerned about the dangers which it represented.
The chief of these dangers was the corruption of the future of
the polis, represented by the male, participated in sexual
intercourse with men were believed to have pros children of
citizen families. Boys who, under certain circumstances
participated in sexual intercourse with men were believed to
have acted for gain and to have adopted a submissive role
which disqualified them as potential citizens. Likewise, adult
citizens who prostituted themselves were subject to the same
civic disabilities and opprobrium. These laws represented one
of the severest sanctions which such a society could impose,
and they reflect the level of concern for the preservation of the
citizen body.” (Cohen, Law, Society and Homosexuality in Classical
Athens, p. 156-157 in Sex and Difference in Ancient Greece and Rome,
editors Mark Golden and Peter Toohey)
“Scholars usually do not refer to hubris in connection with
pederasty because they believe hubris to require violent insult
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and outrage. They have not paid sufficient attention, however,
to the way in which the law of hubris may have provided for
the principle criminal penalties for rape. But although rape is
often characterized as hubris, so is seduction. Euphiletus, for
example, refers to the hubris which the lover of his wife has
committed against him (Lysias 1.4, 17, 25) and an oration of
Demosthenes involves a prosecution for hubris (hubreos
graphe) brought by a son on account of the seduction of his
mother.
Such contexts perfectly match Aristotle’s definition of
hubris as any behaviors which dishonors and shames the victim
for the pleasure or gratification of the offender (Rhetoric 1387b).
Indeed, it is in this connection that Aeschines introduced the
law of hubris into the catalogue of statutes which he
enumerated as regulating paederasty in Athens in the fourth
century B.C. In fact, when he first refers to the law of hubris he
characterizes it as the statute which includes all such conduct in
one summary prohibition: If anyone conmmits hubris against a
child or man or woman or anyone free or slave. ... (Aeschines 1,
15). Accordingly, Athenian sources qualify both rape and
seduction of women and children as acts of hubris, for both
violate the sexual integrity and honor of the family.” (Cohen,
Law, Sexuality, and Society: The Enforcement of Morals in Classical
Athens, p. 178-179)
“The violation of a free boy was hubris, or wanton
disregard of the rights of another, and could lead to the death
penalty. Apparently fathers scolded and schoolmates teased
boys who had lovers. But we do not know how often these
relationships were sexual; they might have been twilight
moments, frequently occurring yet rarely acknowledged.”
(Clark, Desire: A History of European Sexuality, p. 23)
We can now in conclusion say homoerotic behavior in
ancient Greece and our modern western culture has much more
in common and for the most part it is in agreement. There is
great confusion and disagreement. The whole idea of the
societal acceptance and legalization of homosexual behavior is
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the agenda and focus of homosexuals themselves and those on
the liberal political left. Attempting to bring about the
acceptance and change, the social and legal tolerance of
homosexuality by a minority upon the majority. When viewed
in the context of the defining marriage to allow same-sex
marriage, and voting by the general population homosexual
behavior is not approved.
Though one important difference when comparing
homosexuality between the two is that concerning the sexual
component to pederasty, sex between adult males and
adolescent boys is legally and socially not allowed in modern
western society.
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Clark, Anna. Desire: A History of European Sexuality.
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Cohen, David. Law, Society and Homosexuality in Classical
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editors Mark Golden and Peter Toohey.
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Morals in Classical Athens. Cambridge University Press.
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and Classical Antiquity Power, Ethics and Knowledge. Cambridge
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Sissa, Giulia. Translated by George Staunton. Sex and
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Chapter 6
Types of Homosexualities/
Gay and Lesbian Homosexual Identity

Political Identity: Gay and Lesbian Homosexuality


4. Gay and Lesbian Homosexuality Identity
Homosexuality today expressed in a gay and lesbian identity
may possibly be viewed as another type of homosexuality. Just
as the others are historically and culturally specific so is the
modern gay and lesbian. Being a gay and lesbian is not a unitary
construct that is culturally transcendent across all societies
today. A gay and lesbian is a social political identity limited to
modern western cultures, although this gay and lesbian identity
is gradually being expressed and adopted in other parts of the
world.
“The search for a theory of gay identity originated among
gay Left intellectuals. Starting from an ethnic model of history
that at first assumed an already existing identity or social group,
they eventually discovered that homosexuals were historically
constructed subjects.” (Escoffier, Jeffrey, American Homo
Community and Perversity, p. 62)
“We should employ cross-cultural and historical evidence
not only to chart changing attitudes but to challenge the very
concept of a single trans-historical notion of homosexuality. In
different cultures (and at different historical moments or
conjunctures within the same culture) very different meanings
are given to same-sex activity both by society at large and by the
individual participants. The physical acts might be similar, but
the social construction of meanings around them are
profoundly different. The social integration of forms of
pedagogic homosexual relations in ancient Greece have no
continuity with contemporary notions of homosexual identity.
To put it another way, the various possibilities of what
Hocquenghem calls homosexual desire, or what more neutrally

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might be termed homosexual behaviors, which seem from
historical evidence to be a permanent and ineradicable aspect of
human sexual possibilities, are variously constructed in different
cultures as an aspect of wider gender and sexual regulation. If
this is the case, it is pointless discussing questions such as, what
are the origins of homosexual oppression, or what is the nature
of the homosexual taboo, as if there was a single, causative
factor. The crucial question must be: what are the conditions
for the emergence of this particular form of regulation of sexual
behavior in this particular society?” (Weeks, Against Nature, p.
15-16)
“Transcending all these issues of lifestyle was the potent
question of the gay identity itself. The gay identity is no more a
product of nature than any other sexual identity. It has
developed through a complex history of definitions and self-
definition, and what recent histories of homosexuality have
clearly revealed is that there is no necessary connection between
sexual practices and sexual identity.” (Weeks, Sexuality and Its
Discontents: Meanings, Myths and Modern Sexualities, p. 50)
“The idea of a gay and lesbian identity sexual identity has
been formulated over the last two decades. Historically it is the
product of the gay and lesbian liberation movement, which,
itself, grew out of the Black civil rights and women’s liberation
movements of the fifties and sixties. Like ethnic identities,
sexual identity assigns individuals to membership in a group,
the gay lesbian community. Although sexual identity has
become a group identity, its historical antecedents can be traced
to the nineteen-century notion that homosexual men and
women, each representative of a newly discovered biological
specimen, represented a third sex. Homosexuality, which had
been conceived primarily as an act was thereby transformed
into an actor. (De Cecco, 1990b). Once actors had been created
it was possible to assign them a group identity. Once a person
became a member of a group, particularly one that has been
stigmatized and marginal, identity as an individual was easily
subsumed under group identity.” (De Cecco and Parker, The
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Biology of Homosexuality: Sexual Orientation or Sexual Preference, p.
22-23 in Sex, Cells, and Same-Sex Desire: The Biology of Sexual
Preference, editors De Cecco and Parker)
“The configuring of the meaning of homosexuality by its
advocates into a lifestyle alternative or minority status, and the
movement of lesbians and gay men into the social center
parallels the transformation of the social role of the African-
Americans and women during the same period.” (Seidman,
Embattled Eros, p. 148-149)
“On the one hand, lesbians and gay men have made
themselves an effective force in the USA over the past several
decades largely by giving themselves what the civil rights
movement had: a public collective identity. Gay and lesbian
social movements have built a quasi-ethnicity, complete with its
own political and culture institutions, festivals, neighborhoods,
even its own flag. Underlying that ethnicity is typically the
notion that what gays and lesbians share – the anchor of
minority rights claim – is the same fixed, natural essence, a self
with same-sex desires. The shared oppression, these
movements have forcefully claimed, is denial of the freedoms
and opportunities to actualize this self. In this
ethiniclessentialist politic,clear categories of collective identity
are necessary for successful resistance and political gain.”
(Gamson, Must Identity Movements Self-Destruct?, p. 516)
“Lesbian and gay historians have asked questions about the
origins of gay liberation and lesbian feminism, and have come
up with some surprising answers. Rather than finding a silent,
oppressed, gay minority in all times and all places, historians
have discovered that gay identity is a recent, Western, historical
construction. Jeffrey Weeks, Jonathan Katz and Lillian
Faderman, for example have traced the emergence of lesbian
and gay identity in the late nineteenth century. Similarly John
DEmilio, Allan Berube and the Buffalo Oral History Project
have described how this identity laid the basis for organized
political activity in the years following World War II.

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The work of lesbian and gay historians has also
demonstrated that human sexuality is not a natural, timeless
given, but is historically shaped and politically regulated.”
(Duggan, History’s Gay Ghetto: The Contradictions of Growth in
Lesbian and Gay History, p. 151-152 in Sex Wars, edited by
Duggan and Hunter)
“It isn’t at all obvious why a gay rights movement should
ever have arisen in the United States in the first place. And it’s
profoundly puzzling why that movement should have become
far and away the most powerful such political formation in the
world. Same gender sexual acts have been commonplace
throughout history and across cultures. Today, to speak with
surety about a matter for which there is absolutely no statistical
evidence, more adolescent male butts are being penetrated in
the Arab world, Latin American, North Africa and Southeast
Asia then in the west.
But the notion of a gay identity rarely accompanies such
sexual acts, nor do political movements arise to make demands
in the name of that identity. It’s still almost entirely in the
Western world that the genders of ones partner is considered a
prime marker of personality and among Western nations it is
the United States – a country otherwise considered a bastion of
conservatism – that the strongest political movement has arisen
centered around that identity.
We’ve only begun to analyze why, and to date can say little
more then that certain significant pre-requisites developed in
this country, and to some degree everywhere in the western
world, that weren’t present, or hadn’t achieved the necessary
critical mass, elsewhere. Among such factors were the
weakening of the traditional religious link between sexuality and
procreation (one which had made non-procreative same gender
desire an automatic candidate for denunciation as unnatural).
Secondly the rapid urbanization and industrialization of the
United States, and the West in general, in the nineteen century
weakened the material (and moral) authority of the nuclear
family, and allowed mavericks to escape into welcome
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anonymity of city life, where they could choose a previously
unacceptable lifestyle of singleness and nonconformity without
constantly worrying about parental or village busybodies
pouncing on them.” (Duberman, Left Out, p. 414-415)
“I have argued that lesbian and gay identity and
communities are historically created, the result of a process of
capitalist development that has spanned many generations. A
corollary of this argument is that we are not a fixed social
minority composed for all time of a certain percentage of the
population. There are more of us than one hundred years ago,
more of us than forty years ago. And there may very well be
more gay men and lesbians in the future. Claims made by gays
and nongays that sexual orientation is fixed at an early age, that
large numbers of visible gay men and lesbians in society, the
media, and schools will have no influence on the sexual
identities of the young, are wrong. Capitalism has created the
material conditions for homosexual desire to express itself as a
central component of some individuals’ lives; now, our political
movements are changing consciousness, creating the ideological
conditions that make it easier for people to make that choice.”
(D’Emilio, Capitalism and Gay Identity, p. 473-474 in The Lesbian
and Gay Studies Reader by Henry Abelove, Michele Aine Barale
and David M. Halperin)
There is a wealth of cross-cultural evidence that point to the
existence of numerous patterns of homosexuality varying in
origins, subjective states and manifest behaviors. But the
paramenters of the discussion are still best framed as Who one
is, a homosexual or What one does, homosexuality. The
support for the latter is the strongest.
“Descriptions of the Greeks, the berdaches, and the Sambia
should make us a little unsure about our categories homosexual
and heterosexual -least, they should make us think more
carefully about what we mean by these words. But if we are a
little confused about categories, perhaps we can agree on a few
simple facts about human sexuality: (1) same-sex eroticism has
existed for thousands of years in vastly different times cultures;
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(2) in some cultures, same-sex eroticism was accepted as normal
aspect of human sexuality, practiced by nearly all individuals
some of the time; and (3) in nearly every culture that has been
examined in any detail, a few individuals seem to experience a
compelling and abiding sexual orientation toward their own
sex.” (Mondimore, A Natural History of Homosexuality, p. 20)
The reality is that this gay identity a pattern of essentially
exclusive male homosexuality familiar to us which has been
exceedingly rare or unknown in cultures that required or
expected all males to engage in homosexual activity. So, I would
argue this gay identity should be seen not as a type of
homosexuality, but rather as a social movement, a political
cause, a new form of gender identity, and a life-style. Therefore,
the psychosocial conditions of being gay today must be
understood in their own place and historical time.
“Psychological theory, which should be employed to
describe only individual mental, emotional, and behavioral
aspects of homosexuality, has been employed for building
models of personal development that purport to mark the steps
in an individuals’ progression toward a mature and egosyntonic
gay or lesbian identity. The embracing and disclosing of such an
identity, however, is best understood as a political phenomenon
occurring in a historical period during which identity politics
has become a become a consuming occupation.” (De Cecco,
Sex, Cells, and Same-Sex Desire: The Biology of Sexual Preference, p.
21)
Being gay cannot be seen as being a monolithic and an
invariant identity label culturally valid for ancient and medieval
societies. As has been repeatedly stated, historically and
culturally the pattern was for heterosexuality, marriage, and
procreation. Although there have been cases, which are
exceptions to the norm, instances of adult same sex behavior,
are almost always tolerated, but looked down upon with
disapproval.
“Certainly the gay movement is specialized somewhat to
class and urban social formations, and it must be seen from the
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perspective of the decontextualization of sex. Only by
disengaging sexuality from the traditions of family,
reproduction, and parenthood was the evolution of the gay
movement a social and historical likeihood. (Herdt, 1987b).”
(Herdt, Developmental Discontinuities and Sexual Orientation Across
Cultures, p. 224 in Homosexuality/Heterosexuality Concepts of Sexual
Orientation, edited by McWhirter, Sanders and Reinisch)
“It is the myth of gay identity, the belief that homosexuals
are a different kind of people.
Gay identity is one of the great working myths of our age.
Even though it is based on the ideas of gender and sex that
have more to do with folklore than science, it occupies a central
position in the beliefs and principles that govern our behaviors.
It is a significant element of our social organization of gender
and sexuality. The myth holds us all in thrall, not just those who
have adopted the gay role.
We begin with the premise that there exists an evident
distinction between (1) homosexual feelings, (2) homosexual
behavior, and (3) the homosexual role. The argument presented
here is that homosexual feelings play a minor part in becoming
gay, which is chiefly is the result of adopting the homosexual
role.
Being gay is always a matter of self-definition. No matter
what your sexual proclivities or experience, you are not gay
until you decide you are.” (DuBay, Gay Identity: The Self Under
Ban, p. 1-2)
“The gay myth is responsible for the creation of the gay
community, which is an assemblage, not of people who share
the same sexual orientation (they don’t), but of those who have
adopted the gay role. Underlying the many facets of gay life is
an overriding concern with the gay role. The conversation and
behavior of gay-identified individual reveals that what
distinguishes them from others is not their sexual identity but
their identity, their consciousness of being a people set apart.
And what sets them apart is their joint commitment to a role
created by a society solely for the purposes of controlling and
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isolating behaviors.” (DuBay, Gay Identity: The Self Under Ban, p.
2-3)
“Gay people there are, and some are indeed different, but it
is not their sexuality that makes them different. Their real
differences, as significant as they may be, are now submerged in
the emphasis of the gay myth on sexual difference. If anything,
it is their sexuality that they have most in common with all
humans. We can end this introduction with one more appeal
added to countless others, an appeal almost totally ignored by
the academic and medical establishments: Gayness, unlike the
medical term homosexuality, has nothing to do with sex or
sexual orientation. It concerns a wide range of divergent
behaviors that set some people apart from others in their
appearance, gender behavior, emotional sensibilities, intellectual
powers, and their perspective of the world.” (DuBay, Gay
Identity: The Self Under Ban, p. 12)
Even today in our “modern western culture”, being and
acting gay is a developmental discontinuity in our society.
Heterosexuality still continues to be the norm. A “gay identity”
began evolving within large population centers in the late
nineteenth century. In the United States there was rapid growth
as the result of the coming together of large groups of men to
fight in World War Two. These men from rural and small town
America began knowing “others just like themselves”. It has
been more recent, since the 1960s that there has been the
emergence of the individuals who do not marry, but accept the
idea of being single and gay. Before this time most individuals
would be married and their homosexuality was expressed in
sexual acts with members of the same sex. Perhaps the largest
milestone in the emergence of a modern “gay identity” took
place on June 12, 1969, in New York City at a gay bar called
Stonewall Inn. This was an act of resistance, a riot by drag
queens mourning the death of Judy Garland. It was a group of
effeminate men, wearing women’s clothes resisting police
authority, during a raid on the gay bar. This event is often
linked with the beginning of the gay liberation movement.
- 122 -
“After the 1969 Stonewall riots, a homosexual emancipation
movement emerged. This movement, called gay liberation,
resulted from a clash of two cultures and two generations-the
homosexual subculture of the 1950 and 1960s and the New
Left counterculture of 1960s youth. Ideologically, the camp
sensibility of the 1950s and early 1960s had served as a strategy
of containment; it has balanced its scorn for the principle of
consistency with a bitter consciousness of oppression in a
framework that offered no vision of historical change. The gay
liberationists, who had rarely had much appreciation for
traditional gay life, proposed a radical cultural revolution.
Instead of protecting the right to privacy, gay liberation radicals
insisted on coming out- the public disclosure of one’s
homosexuality – which then became the centerpiece of gay
political strategy.” (Escoffier, American Homo Community and
Perversity, p. 58)
“Stonewall was an act of resistance to police authority by
multiracial drag queens mourning the death of Judy Garland,
long divinized by gays. Therefore Stonewall had a cultural
meaning beyond the political: it was a pagan insurrection by the
reborn transvestite priests of Cybele.” (Paglia, Vamps and
Tramps, p. 67)
A second important event allowing for the idea of a gay
identity was the removal of homosexuality as a psychiatric
disorder. In 1973 the American Psychiatric Association
removed homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manuel
of Mental Disorders.
“It was the militant organization of homosexuals, not any
scientific breakthrough, that led to the removal of
homosexuality from the list of diseases of the American
Psychiatric Association in 1974.” (Weeks, Sexuality, p. 85)
“The decision of the American Psychiatric Association to
delete homosexuality from its published list of sexual disorders
in 1973 was scarcely a cool, scientific decision. It was a
response to a political campaign fueled by the belief that its
original inclusion as a disorder was a reflection of an oppressive
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politico-medical definition of homosexuality as a problem.”
(Weeks, Jeffery, Sexuality and Its Discontents: Meanings, Myths and
Modern Sexualities, p. 213)
Why was it decided at this specific point in time that
homosexuality was not pathological after being listed as one for
23 years? For certain it was not a decision based upon new
scientific evidence, for there was very little to support
homosexuality. It was as a result of a three-year social/political
campaign by gay activists, pro-gay psychiatrists and gay
psychiatrists, not as a result of valid scientific studies. Rather
the activities were public disturbances, rallies, protests, and
social/political pressure from others outside of the APA upon
the APA. There also was a sincere belief held by liberal-minded
and compassionate psychiatrists that listing homosexuality as a
psychiatric disorder supported and reinforced prejudice against
homosexuals. Removal of the term from the diagnostic manual
was viewed as a humane, progressive act. A third influencing
factor was an acceptance of new criteria to define psychiatric
conditions. Only those disorders that caused a patient to suffer
or that resulted in adjustment problems were thought to be
appropriate for inclusion in the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual. Adding to the push for removal was an
acknowledgment of the extraordinary resistance of
homosexuality to psychiatric intervention, for overcoming
homosexuality. Some passions and prejudices were involved
with this decision as well. In actuality this action was taken with
such unconventional speed that normal channels for
consideration of the issues were circumvented. This was a time
period of great social upheaval and change, civil rights for
blacks, the Vietnam war, and of course, the sexual revolution.
Though the Board of Trustees voted 13 to 0, a referendum sent
to 25,000 APA members only 25 % responded, and of these
only 58% favored removing homosexuality from the list of
disorders. Follow up surveys of the members of the APA
continued to show that many members consider homosexuality
to be pathological and a disorder. Also, APA members report
- 124 -
that the problems of homosexuals had more to do with their
inner conflicts then with stigmatization by society at large. It is
not what is now termed homophobia. Ronald Bayer in his
book, Homosexuality and the American Psychiatry: The Politics
of Diagnosis covers in depth the removal of homosexuality by
the APA from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuel of Mental
Disorders.
This action taken in the APA had dramatic consequences
on psychosexual life according to Charles Socarides in a article
published in The Journal of Psychohistory, Sexual Politics and Scientific
Logic: The Issue of Homosexuality. He described a movement
within the American Psychiatric Association in which through
social/political activism resulted in a two-phase radicalization of
a main pillar of psychosocial life. The first phase was the
erosion of heterosexuality as the single acceptable sexual
pattern in our culture. This was followed by the second phase
being the raising of homosexuality to the level of an alternative
life. As a result, homosexuality became an acceptable
psychosocial institution alongside heterosexuality as the
prevailing norm of behavior.
“In essence, this movement within the American Psychiatric
Association has accomplished what every other society, with
rare exceptions, would have trembled to tamper with, a revision
of the basic code and concept of life and biology: that men and
women normally mate with the opposite sex and not with each
other.” (Socarides, Sexual Politics and Scientific Logic: The Issue of
Homosexuality, p. 321)
More recent events have shown interesting perspectives.
There has been the formation of NARTH, National
Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality in
1992 that was in response to the growing threat of scientific
censorship. In May of 2001 Dr. Robert L Spitzer reported a
study that homosexuality may sometimes be changeable. Dr.
Spitzer was the psychiatrist who headed the APA committee
that led to the 1973 removal of homosexuality from the APA’s
list of disorders. These events coincide with a growing
- 125 -
influential movement of people who have overcome
homosexuality, and are usually self-identify as ex-gay.
“Another aspect of the development of sexual orientation
and identity which would seem to require investigation is the
reduction of the percentage of men and women engaging in
homosexual behavior with age. A significant percentage of the
medical students and male twins investigated by McConaghy
and colleagues (1987, 1994) reported that they were not
currently aware of homosexual feelings they experienced in
adolescence indicating homosexual feelings diminished or
disappear with age in a proportion of the population.”
(McConaghy, Unresolved Issues in Scientific Sexology, p. 300)
There are individuals who overcome homosexuality and
they do so in multiple ways. But what is of great interest are
those individuals who choose to continue to self-identify as gay
or lesbian but have as their objects of sexual activity members
of the opposite sex. The following are examples of such people
who have made public declarations. JoAnn Loulan was a
prominent lesbian activist in the seventies and eighties who met
and fell in love with a man in the late nineties, and even
appeared on a 20/20 television episode in 1998. Jan Clausen
also a lesbian activist writes in two of her books Beyond Gay or
Straight, Apples and Oranges of a sexual relationship with a man.
This latter book is autobiographical. She began a long-term
monogamous relationship with a man in 1987. In England
Russell T. Davies wrote Queer as Folk and also wrote for British
TV the show Bob and Rose airing in September 2001. This
second show is about a gay man who falls in love with a woman
and has a sexual relationship with her. This series was based on
a friend of Davies’, Thomas, who was well known in the
Manchester, England gay scene. Bert Archer, who identifies as a
gay male in his book, The End of Gay (and the Death of
Heterosexuality), writes of his sexual relationship with a woman.
He also gives examples of other gay men who have similar
experiences.

- 126 -
Of most interest is the actual result of this latest attempt
beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s to define
homosexuality as a one size fits all type of homosexuality, a gay
and lesbian identity. What was at first an attempt to see two
sexual identities, heterosexual and homosexual has been a birth
of multiple sexual identities. It is a fracturing of a one single
sexual identity, homosexual into multiple sexual identities and
heterosexuality.
“What these examples illustrate is that homosexual and
heterosexual are socially constructed categories. There are no
objective definitions of these words; there is no Golden
Dictionary in the Sky that contains the real definitions. These
are words, categories we made up.” (Muehlenhard, Categories and
Sexualities, p. 102-103)
“Although the radicalised movement of self-affirming
lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgendered people and others
proclaimed the desire to end the homosexual and indeed the
heterosexual (Altman 1071/1993) – that is to get rid of
redundant and oppressive categorisations – the reality was
different. Since the early 1970s, there has been considerable
growth of distinctive sexual communities, and of what have
been called quasi-ethnic lesbian and gay identities, and the
proliferation of other distinctive sexual identities from bisexual
to sado-masochistic, and many other subdivisions (Epstein,
1990). Difference has apparently triumphed over convergence,
identity or similarity. The rise of queer politics from the late
1980s can be seen as both a product of and a challenge to these
developments, rejecting narrow identity politics in favor of a
more transgressive erotic warfare (Warner 1993; Seidman 1997)
– while at the same time, ironically, creating a new, post-identity
identity of queer.” (Weeks, Heaphy and Donovan, Same Sex
Intimacies Families of Choice and Other Life Experiments, p. 14)
“Yet perhaps the most enabling breakthrough in the study
of premodern sexualities over the last decade has been precisely
the rejection of easy equations between sexual practice and
individual identity. In the wake of Foucault’s famous dictum-
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The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the
homosexual was now a species (1990, 43) – scholars have
recently brought to light a vast array of homoerotic discourses
in the premodern West that were neither filtered nor
constrained by modern sexual identity categories. In the words
of David Halperin, Before the scientific construction of
sexuality as a supposedly positive, distinct, and constitutive
features of individual human beings. ... Certain kinds of sexual
acts could be individually evaluated and categorized (1990, 26).
While gay and lesbian history in the 1970s and early 1980s
aimed primarily at either identifying, the last decade has seen
the focus shift to erotic acts, pleasures, and desires, to
homoeroticism itself as a pervasive and diverse cultural
phenomenon rather than the closeted practice of a homosexual
minority (see Hunt, 1994).” (Fradenburg and Lavezzo, editors,
Premodern Sexualities, p. 243-244)
“On the one hand, lesbians and gay men have made
themselves an effective force in the USA over the past several
decades largely by giving themselves what the civil rights
movement had: a public collective identity. Gay and lesbian
social movements have built a quasi-ethnicity, complete with its
own political and culture institutions, festivals, neighborhoods,
even its own flag. Underlying that ethnicity is typically the
notion that what gays and lesbians share – the anchor of
minority status and minority rights claim – is the same fixed,
natural essence, a self with same-sex desires. The shared
oppression, these movements have forcefully claimed, is denial
of the freedoms and opportunities to actualize this self. In this
ethiniclessentialist politic, clear categories of collective identity
are necessary for successful resistance and political gain.”
(Gamson, Must Identity Movements Self-Destruct?, p. 516 in
Sexualities: Critical Concepts in Sociology, Volume II, editor Ken
Plummer)
“That Way. That Sort. The whole modern gay movement,
form the mid- to late-Mattachine-style homophilia to Gay is
Good, to Queer Nation and OutRage! to Ellen, Queer as Folk and
- 128 -
beyond, has been a struggle first to define, than to justify
and/or celebrate and/or revel in, than to normalize what was
still thought of by many as being That Way. And there have
been wild successes, genuine victories resulting in real progress
being made in very short spans of time in thinking and acting
on sexuality and human relationships. But there’s a forgotten,
ignored, or perhaps never acknowledged baby in the bathwater
the Movement’s been sumping: the possibility of a sexual
attraction that is neither or exclusively based on anatomy nor
especially relevant to your sense of self. It’s an idea that the
lesbian communities have been dealing with for some time,
something about which they have a lot to teach the rest of us.”
(Archer, The End of Gay (and the Death of Heterosexuality), p. 17-
18)
“Such was the heady agenda of gay liberation. By the mid-
1970s, however, it was evident that the agenda encouraging
people to come out and be proud of being gay – was not
working. Reports of casualties gay related suicides and beatings,
illnesses and death from alcohol and drug use were not
declining. The mortality rate of gay people dying from hepatitis
was staggering: 5,000 a year according to some accounts. New
infectious diseases were appearing, including devastating
internal parasites that added to the already alarming incidences
of other sexually transmitted diseases.
Worse, gay people did not seem to be coalescing into the
productive lifestyle envisioned by the early leaders of the
movement. Where was Whitman’s vision of a land where men,
women, children would join in a continuous celebration of life
and the body electric? What we saw instead was an escalating
spread of promiscuity, prostitution, and pornography. Our
liberated community was rapidly becoming an exploited
community. Gay society founded itself with less and less to be
proud of. The march of gay rights seemed to slow down, and
with the arrival of AIDS, was stopped dead in its tracks.”
(DuBay, Gay Identity: The Self Under Ban, p. 131)

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“In short, the gay lifestyle – if such a chaos can, after all,
legitimately be called a lifestyle – it just doesn’t work: it doesn’t
serve the two functions for which all social framework evolve:
to constrain people’s natural impulses to behave badly and to
meet their natural needs. While it’s impossible to provide an
exhaustive analytic list of all the root causes and aggravants of
this failure, we can asseverate at least some of the major causes.
Many have been dissected, above, as elements of the Ten
Misbehaviors; it only remains to discuss the failure of the gay
community to provide a viable alternative to the heterosexual
family.” (Kirk and Madsen, After the Ball: How America Will
Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of the Gays in the 90s, p. 363)
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Muehlenhard, Charlene L. Categories and Sexuality. Journal of
Sex Research. May 2000, Vol. 37, No. 2, p. 101-107.
Nussabaum, Martha C. and Juha Sihvola. The Sleep of Reason
Erotic Experience and Sexual Ethics in Ancient Greece and Rome. The
University of Chicago Press. Chicago and London, 2002.
Paigila, Camille. Vamps & Tramps. Vintage Books. New
York, 1994.
Patterson, Charolette J. Sexual Orientation and Human
Development: An Overview. Developmental Psychology 1995, Vol. 31,
No.1, p. 3-11.
Percy III, William Armstrong. Pederasty and Pedagogy in
Archaic Greece. University of Illinois Press. Urbana and Chicago,
1996.
Schmidt, Thomas E. Straight and Narrow? InterVarsity Press.
Downers Grove, IL, 1995.
Seidman, Steven. Embattled Eros. Routledge. New York,
1992.
Siker, Jeffery S., editor. Homosexuality in the Church.
Westminster John Knox Press. Louisville, KY, 1994.

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Socarides, Charles W. Sexual Politics and Scientific Logic: The
Issue of Homosexuality 21. The Journal of Psychohistory. 19 (3), Winter
1992.
Strommen, Merton P. The Church and Homosexuality: Searching
for a Middle Ground. Kirk House Publishers. Minneapolis, MN,
2001.
Thorton, Bruse S. Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality.
Westview Press. Boulder, CO, 1997.
Weeks, Jeffrey. Against Nature: Essays on History, Sexuality, and
Identity. Paul and Co. Concord, MA, 1991.
Weeks, Jeffery, Brian Heaphy and Catherine Donovan. Same
Sex Intimacies Families of Choice and Other Life Experiments.
Routledge. London and New York, 2001.
Weeks, Jeffrey. Sexuality, Second Edition. Routledge.
London and New York, 2003.
Wieringa, Sakia. An Anthropological Critique of Constructionism:
Berdaches and Butches, p. 215-238, in Homosexuality, Which
Homosexuality? International Conference on Gay and Lesbian
Studies, Dennis Altman and et al. GMP Publishers, London
and Uitgeverij An Dekker/Schorer, Amsterdam. 1989.

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Chapter 7
Stonewall and the APA

Stonewall
“In short, the political and cultural environment had
undergone a liberalizing shift which had created the
opportunity for the emergence of a mass homosexual
movement.” (Engel, The Unfinished Revolution: Social Movement
Theory and the Gay and Lesbian Movement, p. 38)
“Ironically, when the uprising finally occurred, many people
failed to recognize its significance. Looking back, however,
there is no denying that what began, as a skirmish at a
Greenwhich Village bar became the harbinger for a new
movement of human rights. Detailed accounts of Stonewall
have taken on the quality of myth, as more people remember
being there than could have possibly have fit in the tiny grimy
bar. It is generally accepted that a diverse group of bar patrons,
led by the drag queens who were Stonewall regulars,
spontaneously began to fight back during a police raid. The
resistance turned into a riot, which lasted for several days.”
(Kranz and Cusick, Gay Rights, Revised Edition, p. 35)
“The years leading up to Stonewall saw a breach in the
assimilationist attitudes of the docile homophiles of the
previous generation in favour of more revolutionary ones of
people who craved more purely sexual freedom.” (Archer, The
End Gay, p. 91)
“But in the 1960s and 1970s, the gay movement broke
decisively with the assimilationist rhetoric of the 1950s by
publicly affirming, celebrating, and even cultivating homosexual
difference.” (Chauncey, Why Marriage? The History Shaping
Today’s Debate Over Gay Equality, p. 29)
“An event that took place on June 12, 1969, in New York
City at a gay bar called, the Stonewall Inn, had great social and
cultural historical significance in the development of the
concept of the modern homosexual; who soon adopted what is
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known as a gay identity. This was an act of resistance, a riot by
drag queens mourning the death of Judy Garland. It was a
group of effeminate men, wearing women’s clothes resisting
police authority, during a raid on the gay bar. What started out
as a typical raid by the police, a shake down for bribery from a
gay bar turned out much differently. This event is often linked
with the beginning of the gay liberation movement. It should be
noted that it was a fringe group of homosexuals, and not
representative individuals of the homosexual community at
large who displayed this physical resistance.
Stonewall was an act of resistance to police authority by
multiracial drag queens mourning the death of Judy Garland,
long divinized by gays. Therefore, Stonewall had a cultural
meaning beyond the political: it was a pagan insurrection by the
reborn transvestite priests of Cybele.” (Paglia, Vamps and
Tramps, p. 67)
“In the 1970s gay liberation was the name of a major
theoretical challenge to assimilation as well as minoritization.
Early activists and writers argued that gay liberation could
transform all sexual and gender relations; they argued against
marriage and monogamy and against existing family structures
(Altman, 1981; Jay and Young, 1972).” (Phelan, Sexual Strangers:
Gays, Lesbians, and Dilemmas of Citizenship, p. 108-109)
“Gay liberation had somehow evolved into the right to have
a good time-the right to enjoy bars, discos, drugs, and frequent
impersonal sex.” (Clendinen and Nagourney, Out for Good: The
Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America, p. 445)
American Psychiatric Association
Another historically significant event in the development of
the concept of the modern homosexual occurred in the early
1970s. This was the decision in 1973 by the APA, American
Psychiatric Association, to remove homosexuality from the lists
of sexual disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.
Homosexual advocates acknowledge the hijacking of science
for political gain.

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“The principle source of information about the controversy
over homosexuality is Spitzer. Bayer’s (1981) book length
description of these events was heavily dependent on materials
provided by Spitzer. This is evident not only from reading his
account, but also because he collaborated with Spitzer (Bayer
and Spitzer, 1982) on an edited report of the correspondence of
the principals. Bayer and Spitzer (1985) also coauthored an
account of another closely related episode, the attempt to
extirpate neurosis and other Freudian aspects of DSM.” (Kirk
and Kutchin, The Selling of the DSM: The Rhetoric of Science in
Psychiatry, p. 81)
“In the last 15 years, the APA has battled groups who
wanted certain conditions withdrawn from the DSM list of
mental disorders. Homosexuality is the most celebrated case of
a controversial diagnosis, which psychiatrists were forced to
discard in 1974 (Bayer).” (Kirk and Kutchin, The Selling of the
DSM: The Rhetoric of Science in Psychiatry, p. 237)
“Of course, to mount this counterattack, gays and lesbians
must challenge authority of scientists, and that is exactly what
gay rights activists did when they campaigned to have
homosexuality removed from the APA’s list of mental
disorders. In fact, those activists argued that homosexuality is
not a disease but a lifestyle choice. Although that argument was
successful in the early 1970s, the political climate has changed
in such a way that gay rights advocates no longer want
homosexuality to be thought of as an immutable characteristic,
and the gay gene discourse helps them in this effort.” (Brookey,
Reinventing the Male Homosexual: The Rhetoric and Power of the Gay
Gene, p. 43)
“A standoff persisted until late in 1972 between the
protesters and psychoanalysts such as Irving Bieber and Charles
Socarides who insisted that the ‘scientific evidence’, principally
derived from studies that they had conducted, demonstrated
that homosexuality was a pathological condition, and that a
positive response to gay demands would constitute an
unjustified political accommodation. Enmeshed in the
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controversy was a challenge to psychoanalytic orthodoxy.”
(Kirk and Kutchin, The Selling of the DSM: The Rhetoric of Science in
Psychiatry, p. 82)
“The man who took control was Robert Spitzer. Although
he was a member of the Committee on Nomenclature and
Statistics, which produced DSM-II, he had not been assigned to
resolve the conflict. As the story has been told, he was at a
meeting in October 1972, when more than a hundred gay
activists protested antihomosexual bias. This was his first
contact with gays protesting against psychiatric mistreatment
and he stayed afterwards to talk with one leader of the protest,
Ron Gold.” (Kirk and Kutchin, The Selling of the DSM: The
Rhetoric of Science in Psychiatry, p. 83)
“The result of this encounter was that Spitzer agreed to
arrange a meeting with the Committee on Nomenclature and to
schedule a panel at the next meeting of the APA in May 1973 in
Honolulu. Although this chance encounter has been reported in
several different accounts of the controversy of the diagnosis of
homosexuality, the story leaves much to be explained. Spitzer,
by all accounts, was unfamiliar with the literature and had little,
if any, clinical experience with homosexuals. Nevertheless, as a
result of an unanticipated discussion, he agreed to undertake a
major role in this struggle.” (Kirk and Kutchin, The Selling of the
DSM: The Rhetoric of Science in Psychiatry, p. 83)
“Although he expressed “severe discomfort” (Bayer, 1981,
p. 143) over the idea of a referendum, he and gay activists
drafted a letter that was signed by all of the candidates in an
upcoming election for president and vice president of the APA.
The letter was sent to the entire APA membership, paid for by
funds raised by gay groups, although their participation was
concealed.” (Kirk and Kutchin, The Selling of the DSM: The
Rhetoric of Science in Psychiatry, p. 87-88)
“In 1973, by a vote of 5,854 to 3,810, the diagnostic
category of homosexuality was eliminated from the Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) of the American
Psychiatric Association (Bayer, 1981).” (Donohue and Caselles,
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Homophobia: Conceptual, Definitional, and Value Issues, p. 66; Wright
and Cummings, Destructive Trends in Mental Health The Well-
Intentioned Path to Harm, editors Wright and Cummings)
“In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association seemingly
rejected this view of homosexuality by removing it from its
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders, an official
listing of mental illnesses. But the step was taken under
pressure from gay-liberation activists and did not stimulate a
rethinking of the theory of sexual preferences. In fact, most
psychiatrists disagreed with the removal; just under 70 percent
of 2,500 psychiatrists who responded to a survey conducted by
the journal Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality opposed it. The
eminent senior psychoanalyst Abram Kardiner complained that
the decision was mistaken because the suspicion with which
middle America views homosexuality cannot be voted out of
existence.” (Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality, p. 429-
430)
“The vote was not close although it was described this way
in later accounts: 58% were in favor of deleting homosexuality
from DSM, while only 37% voted against the proposal. Those
familiar with voting patterns among large groups of people
would characterize this as a landslide, but describing the vote as
close served other purposes in subsequent conflicts over the
diagnosis of homosexuality.” (Kirk and Kutchin, The Selling of
the DSM: The Rhetoric of Science in Psychiatry, p. 88)
“The decision of the American Psychiatric Association to
delete homosexuality from its published list of sexual disorders
in 1973 was scarcely a cool, scientific decision. It was a
response to a political campaign fueled by the belief that its
original inclusion as a disorder was a reflection of an oppressive
politico-medical definition of homosexuality as a problem.”
(Weeks, Jeffery, Sexuality and Its Discontents: Meanings, Myths and
Modern Sexualities, p. 213)
“Perhaps the greatest policy success of the early 1970s was
the American Psychiatric Association’s 1973-74 decision to
remove homosexuality from its official Diagnostic and Statistical
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Manual list of mental disorders. This decision did not come
about because a group of doctors suddenly changed their views;
it followed an aggressive and sustained campaign by lesbian and
gay activists.” (Rimmerman, From Identity to Politics: The Lesbian
and Gay Movements in the United States, p. 85-86)
“Writing about the 1973 decision and the dispute that
surrounded it, Bayer (1981) contended that these changes were
produced by political rather than scientific factors. Bayer argued
that the revision represented the APA’s surrender to political
and social pressures, not new data or scientific theories
regarding on human sexuality.” (Donohue and Caselles,
Homophobia: Conceptual, Definitional, and Value Issues, p. 66; Wright
and Cummings, Destructive Trends in Mental Health The Well-
Intentioned Path to Harm, editors Wright, and Cummings)
“Charles Socarides forced the board to submit its decision
to a referendum of the APA membership. Many people
ridiculed the idea that a scientific issue should be settled by a
plebiscite. Ironically, Socarides and Bieber, who had
complained that scientific decisions were being subjected to
political pressures by gays, now justified the use of a political
device to reverse the decision.” (Kirk and Kutchin, The Selling of
the DSM: The Rhetoric of Science in Psychiatry, p. 87)
“The APA’s very process of a medical judgment arrived at
by parliamentary method set off more arguments than it settled.
Many members felt that the trustees, in acting contrary to
diagnostic knowledge, had responded to intense propagandistic
pressures from militant homophile organizations. Politically we
said homosexuality is not a disorder, one psychiatrist admitted,
but privately most of us felt it is.” (Kronemeyer, Overcoming
Homosexuality, p. 5)
“Actually, Spitzer’s position paper, Homosexuality as an
Irregular Form of Sexual Development and Sexual Orientation
Disturbance as a Psychiatric Disorder, did not recommend the entire
elimination of homosexuality from the manual. Although
homosexuality per se was not enough to warrant a diagnosis,
those who were troubled should be given a new diagnosis of
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Sexual Orientation Disturbance. Spitzer did not accept the
position of gay activists that homosexuality was a normal
variant of sexual behavior. He proposed a middle ground
between their position and the assertion that homosexuality was
pathological.” (Kirk and Kutchin, The Selling of the DSM: The
Rhetoric of Science in Psychiatry, p. 85)
“Finally, in December 1973, the matter was considered by
the board of trustees. After listening politely to the objections
of opponents, the board voted unanimously to delete
homosexuality and to replace it with the diagnosis of Sexual
Orientation Disturbance. The final text made a distinction
between homosexuality per se and Sexual Orientation
Disturbance. ‘This diagnostic category is distinguished from
homosexuality which by itself does not necessarily constitute a
psychiatric disorder’ (APA press release cited in Bayer, 1981, p.
137). The meeting was followed by a press conference attended
by the president of the APA, gay activists, and Robert Spitzer.
Major newspapers across the country carried stories
announcing the revision. Many reports missed the nuances of
the compromise. For example, the Washington Post reported
Doctors Rule Homosexuals Not Abnormal (December 12, 1973, p.
1). Their headline ignored the careful denials of the APA
president and Spitzer that the board had not declared that
homosexuality was normal. Spitzer’s statement infuriated gays,
but it made little difference in the public perception of what
had happened.” (Kirk and Kutchin, The Selling of the DSM: The
Rhetoric of Science in Psychiatry, p. 87)
The removing of homosexuality as a sexual disorder was as
a result of a three year long social/political campaign by gay
activists, pro-gay psychiatrists and gay psychiatrists, not as a
result of valid scientific studies. Rather the activities were public
disturbances, rallies, protests, and social/political pressure from
within by gay psychiatrists and by others outside of the APA
upon the APA. The action of removing homosexuality was
taken with such unconventional speed that normal channels for
consideration of the issues were circumvented. This action
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taken in the APA had dramatic consequences on psychosexual
life according to Charles Socarides in a article published in The
Journal of Psychohistory, Sexual Politics and Scientific Logic: The Issue of
Homosexuality. Socarides writes the removal of homosexuality
from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual was a false step with the
following results.
“At the 1970 annual convention of the APA in San
Francisco and at subsequent psychiatric meetings, gay activists
picketed and disrupted conference events in order to draw
attention to their demand that homosexuality be dropped as a
psychiatric category. In addition to disrupting the presentations
by psychoanalysts who were well known for their views that
homosexuality was a form of pathology, gay activists forced the
APA to schedule panels at the annual meetings where the
protesters presented an alternative view of homosexuality as a
normal variation of sexual activity. This pattern of protest
persisted for several years and at the 1972 meeting a masked
and cloaked psychiatrist, ‘Dr. Anonymous’ joined the panel and
declared that he was a homosexual as were more than two
hundred of his associates, some of them members of the Gay
Psychiatric Association, which met socially but secretly during
the annual APA meetings.” (Kirk and Kutchin, The Selling of the
DSM: The Rhetoric of Science in Psychiatry, p. 82)
“Spitzer figured out that what he had to do was propose a
policy that would give therapists the option of treating
homosexuals for something. So, he wrote a statement that
homosexuality by itself, while an irregular sexual development,
is not a psychiatric disorder unless the homosexuals are
distressed by their homosexuality. For the next six or seven
months, Spitzer’s comprise wound its way through the many
levels of the psychiatric bureaucracy. Bolstering the series of
votes on the proposal to change the treatment of
homosexuality in the DSM was the firm commitment of
Freedman and the insurgents at the top to seeing this get done.
Finally, on December 15, 1973¸the Spitzer proposal was
presented to Freedman’s liberal of trustees. Freedman knew
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that he had the votes. But Freedman wanted this profound
social and professional conversion to be as close as possible to
unanimous. To gather more support, Freedman agreed to
weaken some of the pro-homosexual language. Thus, the
original statement that homosexuality in itself does not by itself
constitute a psychiatric disorder was changed by the board to
say that homosexuality in itself does not necessarily constitute a
psychiatric disorder; This was no small change, but, at the end
of the day, the first proposal in history to withdraw
homosexuality from the list of psychiatric disorders passed
unanimously. Victory for Homosexuals, the New York Times
proclaimed the next morning.” (Hirshman, Victory: The
Triumphant Gay Revolution, p. 139)
“This amounted to a full approval of homosexuality and an
encouragement to aberrancy by those who should have known
better, both in the scientific sense and in the sense of the social
consequences of such removal.” (Socarides, Charles W., Sexual
Politics and Scientific Logic: The Issue of Homosexuality, p. 320-321)
In this article, he described a movement within the
American Psychiatric Association that through social/political
activism resulted in a two-phase radicalization of a main pillar
of psychosocial life. The first phase was the erosion of
heterosexuality as the single acceptable sexual pattern in our
culture. This was followed by the second phase the raising of
homosexuality to the level of an alternative lifestyle. As a result,
homosexuality became an acceptable psychosocial institution
alongside heterosexuality as a prevailing norm of sexual
behavior.
“In essence, this movement within the American Psychiatric
Association has accomplished what every other society, with
rare exceptions, would have trembled to tamper with, a revision
of the basic code and concept of life and biology: that men and
women normally mate with the opposite sex and not with each
other.” (Socarides, Charles W., Sexual Politics and Scientific Logic:
The Issue of Homosexuality, p. 321)

- 143 -
The hijacking of science in the APA by those advocating for
homosexuality has now taken a very interesting twist. Thirty
years later after this decision by the APA, Robert L. Spitzer,
M.D. who was instrumental in the removal of homosexuality in
1973 from the lists of sexual disorders in the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual is once again facing the anger of others. The
first time was by those who opposed the normalization of
homosexuality. Now after publishing the results of a study
showing that some people may change their sexual orientation
from homosexual to heterosexual, it is those advocating for
homosexuality. Dr. Spitzer’s study and peer commentaries have
just been published in the October 2003 issue of the Archives of
Sexual Behavior.
“An additional personal parallel-the anger that has been
directed towards me for doing this study reminds me of a
similar reaction to me during my involvement in the removal of
the diagnosis of homosexuality from DSM-II in 1973.” (Spitzer,
Reply: Study Results Should Not be Dismissed and Justify Further
Research on the Efficacy of Sexual Reorientation Therapy, p. 472)
Bibliography
Archer, Bert. The End of Gay (and the Death of Heterosexuality).
Thunder’s Mouth Press. New York, 2002.
Bayer, Ronald. Homosexuality and the American Psychiatry: The
Politics of Diagnosis. Basic Books. New York, 1981.
Brookey, Robert Alan. Reinventing the Male Homosexual: The
Rhetoric and Power of the Gay Gene. Indiana University Press.
Bloomington & Indianapolis, 2002.
Chauncey, George. Why Marriage? The History Shaping Todays
Debate Over Gay Equality. Basic Books/Perseus Books Group.
New York, 2004.
Clendinen, Dudley and Adam Nagourne. Out for Good: The
Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America. Simon and
Schuster. New York, 1990.
Engel, Stephen M. The Unfinished Revolution: Social Movement
Theory and the Gay and Lesbian Movement. Cambridge University
Press. Cambridge, UK, 2001.
- 144 -
Greenberg, David F. The Construction of Homosexuality. The
University of Chicago Press. Chicago & London, 1988.
Hirshman, Linda. Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution.
Harper. New York, 2012.
Kirk, Stuart A. and Herb Kutchins. The Selling of the DSM:
The Rhetoric of Science in Psychiatry. Alindine De Gruyter. New
York, 1992.
Konemeyer, Robert. Overcoming Homosexuality. Macmillan.
New York, 1980.
Kranz, Rachel and Tim Cusick. Gay Right: Revised Edition.
Facts on File, Inc. New York, 2005.
Paigila, Camille. Vamps & Tramps. Vintage Books. New
York, 1994.
Phelan, Shane. Sexual Strangers: Gays, Lesbians, and Dilemmas
of Citizenship. Temple University Press. Philadelphia, 2001.
Rimmerman, Craig A. From Identity to Politics: The Lesbian and
Gay Movements in the United States. Temple University Press.
Philadelphia, 2002.
Socarides, Charles W. Sexual Politics and Scientific Logic: The
Issue of Homosexuality. The Journal of Psychohistory Winter 1992, 19
(3), p. 307-329.
Spitzer, Robert L., M.D. Reply: Study Results Should Not be
Dismissed and Justify Further Research on the Efficacy of Sexual
Reorientation Therapy. Archives of Sexual Behavior October 2003,
Vol. 32, No. 5, p. 469-472.
Weeks, Jeffery. Sexuality and Its Discontents: Meanings, Myths
and Modern Sexualities. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London,
1988.
Wright, Rogers H. and Nicolas A. Cummings. Destructive
Trends in Mental Health: The Well-Intentioned Path to Harm.
Routledge Taylor & Francis Group. New York and Hove.

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Chapter 8
Circuit Parties and the Gay Male Clone

Circuit Parties
“Circuit parties” are unique to the homosexual community,
but are like other parties called raves and can be traced back to
the popularity of disco music in the 1970s. The popularity of
these circuit parties has grown tremendously over the past 10
years. There is no uniform definition of a circuit party because
these parties continue to evolve.
“However, a circuit party tends to be a multi-event weekend
that occurs each year at around the same time and in the same
town or city and centers on one or more large, late-night dance
events that often have a theme (for example, a color such as
red, black or white).” (Mansergh, Colfax, Marks, Rader,
Guzman and Buchbinder, The Circuit Party Men’s Health Survey:
Findings and Implications for Gay and Bisexual Men, p. 953)
“Circuit Parties are weekend-long, erotically-charged, drug-
fueled gay dance events held in resort towns across the country.
There’s at least one party every month somewhere in the U.S. –
New York’s Black Party, South Beach’s White Party, Montreal’s
Black and Blue Party, and so on – and people travel far and
wide to take part.” (Ghaziani, The Circuit Party’s Faustian Bargain,
p. 21)
Because these circuit parties are unique to the homosexual
community, it is from the media of this community itself that
most of the information about these parties comes from.
Although there has been a study published in the American
Journal of Public Health, which is quoted from above. I have
also found an article form usatoday.com, Worries crash circuit
parties, 06/20/2002. The information that is coming from all
sources is strikingly similar. That is the high prevalence of drug
use and sexual activity, including unprotected anal sex.
“The circuit – with its jet set A-List of well-heeled and
muscular gay men – had actually been in existence in the pre-
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AIDS time, albeit it was small and very exclusive. It consisted in
the late 1970s into the early 1980s mostly of a about thousand
men who flew back and forth between New York and Los
Angeles, going from the famous parties at the Flamingo and the
Saint in New York to the ones at the Probe in L.A. But in the
1990s the circuit grew to consist of parties all around the
country, indeed around the world-from Miami to Montreal,
Vancouver to Sydney – with tens of thousands of men who
regularly attend events. In the early 1990s there were only a
handful of events; by 1996, according to Alan Brown in Out and
About, a gay travel newsletter, there were over 50 parties a year,
roughly one per week. Typically, these are weekend-long events,
more a series of all-night (and daytime) parties stretching over a
few days, often taking place in resort hotels, each punctuated by
almost universal drug use among attendees.” (Signorile, Life
Outside, p. 64-65)
“Every party has a similar format, with loud music and
dancing at its core, spiced with live entertainment from popular
singers and scantily-clad male dancers. Circuit parties began in
the mid-1980s as part of an effort to raise gay men’s awareness
of AIDS as well as to raise funds to combat the disease and
help its victims. To this day, many circuit parties are
HIV/AIDS charity events, benefiting a variety of nonprofit
organizations.” (Ghaziani, The Circuit Party’s Faustian Bargain, p.
21)
“According to health officials, Palm Springs, CA has
developed one of the highest per capita rates of syphilis in the
nation, driven mostly by gay and bisexual men. Palm Springs is
where the White Party is held annually in April. The 2003 party
raised concerned among public health officials and some gay
leaders that the event would feed the spread of syphilis.
Some charities - along with public health officials and many gay
rights leaders - are increasingly uncomfortable with what has
become the dark side of circuit parties: widespread drug use and
random, unprotected sex that some charities say is just the type

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of behavior they discourage.” (Worries crash circuit parties,
www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2002/06/20/circuit-parties-usat.htm)
“Our findings confirm anecdotal reports of a high
prevalence of drug use during circuit party weekends and at
specific party events.” (Mansergh, Colfax, Marks, Rader,
Guzman and Buchbinder, The Circuit Party Men’s Health Survey:
Findings and Implications for Gay and Bisexual Men, p. 956)
“Sexual activity, including unprotected anal sex, was
relatively common during circuit party weekends.” (Mansergh,
Colfax, Marks, Rader, Guzman and Buchbinder, The Circuit
Party Men’s Health Survey: Findings and Implications for Gay and
Bisexual Men, p. 956)
“Consider the potential impact of circuit party weekends on
HIV infection rates and rates of infection with other sexually
transmitted diseases, based on sexual mixing opportunities and
patterns both within and beyond the 3-day periods. Our data
pertain to a single party weekend for each participant. If we
multiply the prevalence of sexual risk behavior by the median of
3 parties per year revealed in this sample, and if we consider the
large number of men who attend circuit parties, as well as the
growing popularity of such parties, then the likelihood of
transmission of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases
among party attendees and secondary partners becomes a real
public health concern.” (Mansergh, Colfax, Marks, Rader,
Guzman and Buchbinder, The Circuit Party Men’s Health Survey:
Findings and Implications for Gay and Bisexual Men, p. 957)
“This seems harmless enough, but there is also a flipside.
While the evidence to date is inconclusive, circuit parties may
ironically be a potential site for HIV infection. The irony is that
circuit parties began as vehicles for HIV awareness and
fundraising.” (Ghaziani, The Circuit Party’s Faustian Bargain, p.
22)
“It is well known, both anecdotally and through research,
that drug use is wide spread at circuit parties. Studies indicate
that club drugs are consumed by about 95 percent of party
attendees (Mansergh, 2001). Indeed, drug use is incorporated
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into the setting as an integral part of circuit culture.” (Ghaziani,
The Circuit Party’s Faustian Bargain, p. 22)
“Research reveals an abundance of sexual activity during
party weekends.” (Ghaziani, The Circuit Party’s Faustian Bargin, p.
22)
But one national gay organization in September of 2004
appears not to be concerned with this dark side of circuit
parties. The NGLTF (National Gay and Lesbian Task Force)
has purchased the rights and assets to the Winter Party held in
Miami, FL. A Washington Blade online article (Friday,
September 09, 2004) quotes the executive director of the
NGLTF, who sees no problem with being a sponsor of a
“circuit party”. He goes on to call it a dance event.
“Foreman said he sees no problem with the Task Force
becoming associated with a circuit party.
We’re very proud to have acquired the Winter Party
Foreman said. ‘Having a dance event where people come
together and have a good time is a good thing.’” (Task Force to
take over Winter Party, Washington Blade online, Friday, September
03, 2004)
Gay Male Clones
Throughout history the male homosexual was often based
on non-gender conformity, that is the effeminate male.
Although this continues, today, a rejection of this stereotyping
is seen in the gay male clone. There are two books written by
homosexuals themselves that defines this gay male clone.
Michelango Signorile is the author of the book Life Outside.
Signorile writes about gay men, masculinity, the gay male clone,
and circuit parties. Martin Levine was a sociologist, and
university professor. The book Gay Macho is an edited version
of Levine’s doctoral dissertation. He died from complications
of AIDS at the age of 42. The “gay male clone” was not a
representative homosexual, but only one of many groups
among the modern homosexual, gays, lesbians, queers, and
homosexual.

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“Clones symbolize modern homosexuality. When the dust
of gay liberation had settled, the doors to the closet were
opened, and out popped the clone. Taking a cue from
movement ideology, clones modeled themselves upon
traditional masculinity and the self-fulfillment ethic.
(Yankelovitch, 1981) Aping blue-collar workers, they butched it
up and acted like macho men. Accepting me-generation values,
they searched for self-fulfillment in anonymous sex, recreational
drugs, and hard partying. Much to activists’ chagrin, liberation
turned the Boys in the Band into doped-up, sexed-out,
Marlboro men.
The clone was, in many ways, the manliest of men. He had a
gym-defined body; after hours of rigorous body building, his
physique rippled with bulging muscles, looking more like
competitive body builders than hairdressers or florists. He wore
blue-collar garb-flannel shirts over muscle T-shirts, Levi 501s
over work boots, bomber jackets over hooded sweatshirts. He
kept his hair short and had a thick moustache or closely
cropped beard. There was nothing New Age or hippie about
this reformed gay liberationist. And the clone lived the fast life.
He partied hard, taking recreational drugs, dancing in discos till
dawn, having hot sex with strangers.
Throughout the seventies and early eighties clones set the
tone in the homosexual community (Altman, 1982, p. 103;
Holleran 1982). Glorified in the gay media, promoted in gay
advertising, clones defined gay chic, and the clone life style
became culturally dominant. Until AIDS. As the new disease
ravaged the gay male community in the early 1980s, scientist
discovered that the clone lifestyle was toxic: specific sexual
behaviors, even promiscuity, might be one of the ways that the
HIV virus spread in the gay male population. Drugs, late nights,
and poor nutrition weakened the immunity system (Fettner and
Check 1984).” (Levine, Gay Macho, p. 7-8)
“The clone role reflected the gay world’s image of this kind
of gay man, a doped-up, sexed-out, Marlboro man. Although
the gay world derisively named this social type the clone, largely
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because of is uniform look and life-style, clones were the
leading social type within gay ghettos until the advent of AIDS.
At this time, gay media, arts, and pornography promoted clones
as the first post-Stonewall form of homosexual life. Clones
came to symbolize the liberated gay man.” (Levine, The Life and
Death of Gay Clones, p. 69-70 in Gay Culture in America: Essays from
the Field, editor Gilbert Herdt)
“Four features distinguished clones: (1) strongly masculine
dress and deportment; (2) uninhibited recreational sex with
multiple partners, often in sex clubs and baths; (3) the use of
alcohol and other recreational drugs; and (4) frequent
attendance at discotheques and other gay meeting places. Clone
culture with its pattern of sexual availability, erotic apparel,
multiple partners, and reciprocity in sexual technique became an
important organizing feature of gay male life during the 1970s.
It also became a seedbed for high rates of sexually transmitted
diseases as well as frequent transmission of the hepatitis B
virus. Many treated sexually transmitted diseases as a price that
had to be paid for a life style of erotic liberation.” (Jonsen and
Stryker, editors, The Social Impact of AIDS in the United States, p.
261-262)
“A key factor in the formulation and promulgation of the
cult of masculinity that also dismayed the gay liberationist was
that the dominant gender style was now supermasculine. It was
as if the 1960s and the counter culture androgyny never
occurred. Gay male culture was still reeling from the crisis of
masculinity that had affected homosexuals for decades. Gay
men, attracted to the masculine ideas they’d cultivated in the
furtive days prior to Stonewall, seemed now institutionalize and
exaggerate a heterosexual-inspired, macho look. The 1970s
clone was born, and his look explored on the streets of rapidly
growing gay ghettos in dozens of American cities.” (Signorile,
Life Outside, p. 52-53)
“A whole industry was sprouting from and glorifying this
male culture, with clothing stores like All American Boy on
Castro Street, a gym called Body Works, and dozens of sex
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clubs and baths, with names like Animals. The sex clubs catered
to every to every imaginable sexual taste: the leather set; men
who enjoyed being tied up; men who wished to be urinated on.
The bathhouses had once been seen as an expression of gay
liberation, at least among those who equated gay liberation with
sexual abandon. Now, they were celebrating and enforcing the
values that Evans saw parading down the Castro every day: The
Premium was put on physical appearance and conformity.”
(Clendinen and Nagourney, Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a
Gay Rights Movement in America, p. 445)
For the gay male clone what resulted was not gay liberation
or freedom from alienation by society, but was bondage into
the enforced cult of modern homosexuality.
“Similarly, in particular, clone culture constructs an identity
of apparently complete uniformity: individual differences, even
physical differences, are undermined in a self-conscious attempt
to appear completely masculine, partly as a development of the
1970s attempts to create a counter- or alternative culture and
partly as an attempt to oppose stereotypes of effeminacy. Most
importantly, then, clone culture is essentially a masculine
construction. The various identities are all related to
occupations traditionally defined as masculine or real man’s
work: the western cowboy, the construction worker, the
military, motorcyclists, sportsmen, or policemen. These
costumes or uniforms reinforced or reflected overall the 1970s
masculinisation of male homosexual culture as previously
outlined in chapter. 2.” (Edwards, Erotics and Politics: Gay male
sexuality, masculinity and feminism, p. 96)
“For a great many gay men in the urban centers-the
majority of which, some studies since the 1970s have shown,
have hundreds of partners throughout their lives-living the
fantasy has of course all been under the guises of liberation. But
perhaps there is no such thing as true liberation. When we
break from one rigid system, we often create another. It’s true
that most gay men in urban America are not having a life of
enforced heterosexuality, as gay liberationist might call it, with a
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driveway, a picket fence, and children to nurture. Many are,
however, instead living a life of enforced cult homosexuality,
with parties, drugs, and gyms ruling their lives.” (Signorile, Life
Outside, p. 26-27)
In New York City, San Francisco, and other large cities
many gay and lesbians had formed large gay communities. So, it
was now possible to live, work, and socialize in what became
gay ghettos. The following quote is making reference to the
opening of, The Saint, a large disco for gay males in New York
City.
“It was mailed only to Mailmans friends and their friends, a
self-selected group that formed the base of The Saint’s
membership of three thousand. Anyone who wanted to join
had to be referred by a member to the membership office for
screening. The clientele reflected the screening process: nearly
all white, professional in their twenties and thirties, mostly
good-looking and muscled, with the mustaches and short hair
that were the style of the time.” (Clendinen and Nagourney, Out
for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America, p.
442-443)
“The streets of San Francisco offered, in theory at least, a
cross-section of America’s male homosexual community, but,
Evans thought, one would never know it to walk down Castro
Street. All these men looked identical, with their short haircuts,
clipped mustaches and muscular bodies, turned out in standard-
issue uniforms of tight faded blue jeans and polo shirts. The
image was one part military, one part cowboy, one part 1950s
suburbia and conformity, and they swaggered down the street,
many aloof and unfriendly, as if their affected distance
enhanced their masculinity.” (Clendinen and Nagourney, Out for
Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America, p.
444)
Bibliography
Clendinen, Dudley and Adam Nagourne. Out for Good: The
Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America. Simon and
Schuster. New York, 1990.
- 153 -
Edwards, Tim. Erotics and Politics: Gay Male Sexuality,
Masculinity and Feminism. Routledge. London and New York,
1994.
Ghaziani, Amin. The Circuit Party’s Faustin Bargain. The Gay
& Lesbian Review/Worldwide, July-August 2005, Volume XII,
Number 4, p. 21-24.
Jonsen, Albert R. and Jeff Stryker. The Social Impact of AIDS
in the United States. National Academy Press. Washington D.C.,
1993.
Levine, Martin P. Gay Macho. New York University Press.
New York and London, 1998.
Levine, Martin P. The Life and Death of Gay Clones. p. 68-86 in
Gay Culture in America: Essays from the Field, editor Gilbert Herdt.
Mansergh, Gordon, Ph.D., Grant N. Colfax, M.D., Gary
Marks, Ph.D., Melissa Rader, MPH, Robert Guzman, B.A. and
Susan Buchbinder, M.D. The Circuit Party Men’s Health Survey:
Findings And Implications for Gay and Bisexual Men. American Journal
of Public Health, June 2001, Vol. 91, No. 6, p. 953-958.
Signorile, Michelangelo. Life Outside. HarperCollins
Publishers. New York, 1997.

- 154 -
Chapter 9
Gay Male Homosexual
and Sexual Behavior of Gay Males

The gay male clone was not a representative male


homosexual of gay liberation during the late 1960s and early
1970s. But what was representative of male homosexuality was
what became to be known as the gay male lifestyle. What it
meant to be me a gay male homosexual was extremely
sexualized, a lifestyle that revolved around sexual activity. In all
of history the male homosexual of gay liberation appears to be
unique. Historically significant too are the consequences
resulting from this gay liberation for all homosexuals and for all
of society.
A change in who homosexuals actually have sex with,
became more significant during the 1960s and resulted in new
sexual behaviors among male homosexuals. Prior to the 1960s
homosexual men had sex with heterosexual men who were
called “trade”. The latter was the passive partner in a sex act;
usually this was an oral sex act. Although there were occasions
when the heterosexual trade was the active insertive partner in
anal sex. But as the stigma against homosexuality increased
heterosexual men became frightened that they too might be
labeled homosexual and thus were no longer willing to be
participate in sexual activity with homosexual men. This
resulted in more homosexual men having sex with other
homosexual men and the specific sexual behaviors themselves
also changed. This change in male homosexual behavior also
resulted in the changes in some of the specific diseases that
effected male homosexuals and dramatic rates in the instances
of sexually transmitted diseases among male homosexuals.
“Indeed, there is no record of any culture that accepted
both homosexuality and unlimited homosexual promiscuity. Far
from being the universal default mode of male homosexuality,

- 155 -
the lifestyle of American gay men in the seventies and eighties
appears unique in history.” (Rotello, Sexual Ecology: AIDS and
the Destiny of Gay Men, p. 225)
“For the first time ever, a community standard developed
that transformed anonymous sex into a god thing – another
choice on the broadening sexual palette. Casual sex encounters
no longer took place simply because men needed to conceal
their identities, but because it was considered hot to separate
sex from intimacy.” (Sadownick, Sex Between Men, p. 83)
“In the 1970s, a new cultural scenario developed that
celebrated and encouraged sexual experimentation and the
separation of sex from intimacy among gay men; this, in turn,
reinforced the transactional nature of the market as anonymous
sexual encounters and multiple partners became normative (see
Murray, p. 196, 175; Sadownick, 1996, p. 77-112). Levine (1992,
p. 83) summarizes the effect of gay liberation on gay sexual
scripts: Gay liberation’s redefinition of same-sex love as a manly
form of erotic expression provoked masculine identification
among clones, which was conveyed through butch
presentational strategies, and cruising, tricking, and partying...
In a similar vein, the roughness, objectification, anonymity, and
phallocentrism association with cruising and tricking expressed
such macho dictates as toughness and recreational sex... The
cultural idea of self-gratification further encouraged these
patterns, sanctioning the sexual and recreational hedonism
inherent in cruising, tricking, and partying. While relational sex
or coupling and safe sex may have become symbolically
important in the 1980s and 1990s, scripts that legitimate the
transactional market are still prominent, and there is no
conclusive evidence that the market has become relational (see
Sadownick, 1996, chapters 5-7; Murray 1996, p. 175-78; cf.
Levine 1992, p. 79-82.).” (Laumann, Ellingson, Mahay, Paik and
Youm, The Sexual Organization of the City, p. 97)
“In sum, gay sex institutions and the sexual activity in them
became the functional social equivalent of family, friends, and
community: They promoted social bonds that gave gays a sense
- 156 -
of belonging and social support.” (Rushing, The AIDS Epidemic:
Social Dimensions of an Infectious Disease, p. 30)
“The institutions of the gay world have often made it easier
for men to meet for sex than for companionship, and most
long-lasting relationships accept sexual infidelity, through the
word itself rings oddly.” (Altman, Defying Gravity: A Political Life,
p. 118)
In general, sexual adventure is regarded within the gay
world as an end in itself, not necessarily linked to emotional
commitment- while, in reverse, emotional commitment does
not demand sexual constancy (may not even demand sex at all)
to survive. (Altman, Defying Gravity: A Political Life, p. 118)
“These observations of new syndromes associated with a
very active male homosexual life-style suggests that both the
type of sexual activity and the extent of promiscuity associated
with it changed markedly during the 1970s.” (Root-Bernstein,
Rethinking AIDS: The Tragic Cost of Premature Consensus, p. 285-
286)
“The extensive casual networks of gays engaging in sex
apparently for the sole purpose of sensuous pleasure, and in so
many different ways, went far beyond anything that had
occurred before in the United States or elsewhere or that
anyone could have imagined just a few years previously.
Without question, the sexual style of gay communities in the
1970s and early 1980s was a specific historic phenomenon
(Bateson and Goldsby, 1988, p. 44).” (Rushing, The AIDS
Epidemic Social Dimensions of an Infectious Disease, p. 27)
“The complex research agenda that characterized the period
from the early 1970s to the beginning of the AIDS epidemic
reflected major changes within the gay and lesbian communities
themselves. The decision by a large number to openly label
themselves gay men and lesbian changed the experience of
same-gender sexuality. From a relatively narrow homosexual
community based primarily on sexual desire and affectional
commitment between lovers and circles of friends, there
emerged a community characterized by the building of
- 157 -
residential areas, commercial enterprises, health and social
services, political clubs, and intellectual movements.” (Turner,
Miller and Moses, editors, AIDS, Sexual Behavior and Intravenous
Drug Use, p. 127)
“Gay historian Dennis Altman notes that in the liberated
seventies, when promiscuity was seen as a virtue in some
segments of the gay community, being responsible about one’s
health was equated with having frequent checks for syphilis and
gonorrhea, and such doubtful practices as taking a couple of
tetracycline capsules before going to the baths. To gay men for
whom sex was the center and circumference of their lives, their
only real health concern was that illness would prevent them
from having sex – which, to their way of thinking, meant they
would no longer be proudly gay.” (Andriote, Victory Deferred:
How AIDS Changed Gay Life in America, p. 37)
“When AIDS hit the homosexual communities of the US,
several studies were conducted by the vigilant CDC to
determine what it was in the homosexual lifestyle which
predisposed to this immunosuppressive condition. There were
really only two things which distinguished the homosexual
lifestyle: the promiscuous sex and the extensive use of
recreational drugs.” (Adams, AIDS: The HIV Myth, p. 127)
“Other men who had participated enthusiastically in the life
of the ghetto had grown tired of its anonymity and inverted
values. They questioned why membership in the gay
community had come to require that one be alienated from his
family, take multiple drugs and have multiple sex partners,
dance all night at the right clubs, and spend summer weekends
at the right part of Fire Island. Rather than providing genuine
liberation, gay life in the ghettos had created another sort of
oppression with its pressure to conform to social expectations
of what a gay man was supposed to be, believe, wear, and do.”
(Andriote, Victory Deferred: How AIDS Changed Gay Life in
America, p. 24)

- 158 -
Sexual Behavior of Gay Male Homosexuals
Unique in the history of homosexuality is what begin to
occur in the 1960s and continues today. That is the social
behavior and sexual behavior of gay male homosexuals. This
fundamental change began with gay male self-perceptions and
beliefs in what it meant to be a gay male homosexual. What it
meant to be me a gay male homosexual was extremely
sexualized, a lifestyle that revolved around sexual activity. This
resulting change in social behavior resulted in correspondingly
changes in sexual behavior. That is the sexual habits of gay male
homosexuals: ways of having sex, kindsm and numbers of
partners. Gay male homosexuals abandoned strict role
separation in the sex act itself, and played both the insertive and
receptive roles in anal sex. Even more dramatic in gay male
sexual behavior was the number of partners that is the
promiscuity of gay male homosexuals.
“Furthermore, in previous periods in history when
homosexuality had been widely accepted socially, as, for
example, in classical Greece, there had been no sexual practices
remotely resembling those associated with the gay subcultures
of the 1970s and 1980s.” (Rushing, The AIDS Epidemic Social
Dimensions of an Infectious Disease, p. 27)
“Evidence convincingly argues that before the middle of the
century gay sexual behavior was vastly different from what it
was to become later, that from mid-century onward there were
fundamental changes not only in gay male self-perceptions and
beliefs, but also in sexual habits, kinds and numbers of partners,
even ways of making love. These revolutions reached a fever
pitch just as at the moment HIV exploded like a series of time
bombs across the archipelago of gay America. When gay
experience is viewed collectively, it appears that the
simultaneous introduction of new behaviors and a dramatic rise
in the scale of old ones produced one of the greatest shifts in
sexual ecology ever recorded. There is convincing evidence that
this shift had a decisive impact on the transmission of virtually
every sexually transmitted disease, of which HIV was merely
- 159 -
one, albeit the most deadly.” (Rotello, Sexual Ecology: AIDS and
the Destiny of Gay Men, p. 39)
“In the 1970s an extraordinary proliferation of clubs, bars,
discotheques, bathhouse, sex shops, travel agencies, and gay
magazines allowed the community to come out and adopt a
whole new repertoire of erotic behavior, out of all measure to
any similar past activities.” (Grmek, History of AIDS, p. 168-169)
“We don’t know, in real quantitative terms, what really
changed in homosexual behavior in the 1970s, but it is possible
to identify three major areas of change: the expansion of
homosexual bathhouses and sex clubs, which facilitate
numerous sexual contacts in one night (by 1984 one bathhouse
chain included baths in forty-two American cities, including
Memphis and London, Ontario), the emergence of sexually
transmitted parasites as a major homosexual health problem,
especially in New York and California, and a boom in
recreational drugs - that is, the use of chemical stimulants such
as MDA, angel dust, various nitrates, etc. - in conjunction with
what came to be known as fast-lane sex. These three elements
would all be linked to various theories about AIDS during the
1980s.” (Altman, AIDS in the Mind of America, p. 14)
“When the bath-houses existed, for example, many men
who attended sought out multiple sexual experiences each
evening; many would be disappointed if they only had one
sexual encounter during the course of several hours. In his
study of the bath-house culture in the 1960s, for example,
Martin Hoffman interviewed one young man who, as the
passive receptor, often had some fifty sexual contacts in the
course of an evening.
Bath-house sex, as is true of various other contexts of gay
sexual activity, was generally anonymous. The men who went
there usually had no social contact with each other save for the
most casual of conversations. They had no knowledge of the
nature of each other’s lives in the outside world and addressed
one another only by first names.” (Giddens, The Transformation of
Intimacy Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies, p. 145)
- 160 -
“One of the remarkable features of the baths is the really
very great amount of sexual contact that a man can have during
a single visit to a bath. In fact, many customers are disappointed
if they go to the baths and have only one sexual experience,
even though they may feel it is satisfactory. I once interviewed a
young man who preferred to take the receptor role in anal
intercourse and had 48 sexual contacts in one evening, simply
by going into his room, leaving the door open, lying on his belly
and letting 48 men in succession sodomize him.” (Hoffman,
The Gay World: Male Homosexuality and the Social Creation of Evil, p.
50)
“Perhaps the most import fact about a gay bar is that it is a
sexual marketplace. That is, men go there for the purpose of
seeking sexual partners, and if this function were not served by
the bar there would be no gay bars, for although homosexuals
also go there to drink and socialize, the search for sexual
experience is in some sense the core of the interaction in the
bar.” (Hoffman, The Gay World: Male Homosexuality and the Social
Creation of Evil, p. 53)
“Anal sex had come to be seen as an essential – possibly the
essential - expression of homosexual intimacy by the 1980s.”
(Rotello, Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men, p. 101)
“In the middle of the century, and particularly in the sixties
and seventies, gay men began doing something that appears
rare in sexual history: They began to abandon strict role
separation in sex and alternately play both the insertive and
receptive roles, a practice sometimes called versatility.” (Rotello,
Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men, p. 76)
“Another relative novelty was the increasing flexibility of
sex roles. Homosexuality in more traditional cultures had
typically followed rigid patterns: certain men were the insertive
partners in oral and anal intercourse, others the receptive ones.
In the 1970s and 1980s, however, American gay men often took
both insertive and receptive roles. Rather than serve as cul-de-
sac for the virus, as heterosexual women often did, gay and
bisexual men more often acted as an extremely effective
- 161 -
conduit for HIV.” (Allen, The Wages of Sin: Sex and Disease, Past
and Present, p. 125-126)
“As the gay version of the sexual revolution took hold
among certain groups of gay men in America’s largest cities, it
precipitated a change in sexual behaviors. Perhaps the most
significant change was the fact that some core groups of gay
men began practicing anal intercourse with dozens or even
hundreds of partners a year. Also significant was a growing
emphasis on versatile anal sex, in which partners alternately
played both receptive and insertive roles, and on new behaviors
such as analingus, or rimming that facilitated the spread of
otherwise difficult-to-transmit microbes. Important, too, was a
shift in patterns of partnership, from diffuse systems in which a
lot of gay sex was with non-gay identified partners who
themselves had few contacts, to fairly closed systems in which
most sexual activity was within a circle of other gay men. Also
important was a general decline in group immunity caused by
repeated infections of various STDs, repeated inoculations of
antibiotics and other drugs to combat them, as well as
recreational substantive abuse, stress, and other behaviors that
comprised immunity.” (Rotello, Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the
Destiny of Gay Men, p. 57-58)
“The magical link was through a key term. One word, the
gay writer Nathan Frain has written, is like a hand grenade in
the whole affair: promiscuity. Although promiscuity has long
been seen as a characteristic of male homosexuals, there is little
doubt that the 1970s saw a quantitative jump in its incidence as
establishments such as gay bath-houses and back-room bars,
existing specifically for the purposes of casual sex, spread in all
major cities of the United States and elsewhere from Toronto
to Pairs, Amsterdam to Sydney (though London remained more
or less aloof, largely due to the effects of the 1967 reform).
Michel Foucalt has written characteristically of the growth of
laboratories of sexual experimentation in cities such as San
Francisco and New York, the counterpart of the medieval
courts where strict rules of proprietary courtship were defined.
- 162 -
For the first time for most male homosexuals, sex became easily
available. With it came the chance not only to have frequent
partners but also to explore the varieties of sex. Where sex
becomes to available, Foucault suggests, constant variations are
necessary to enhance the pleasure of the act. For many gays
coming out in the 1970s the gay world was a paradise of sexual
opportunity and of sensual exploration.” (Weeks, Jeffery,
Sexuality and Its Discontents: Meanings, Myths and Modern Sexualities,
p. 47-48)
“These data demonstrate definitively that the gay liberation
movement resulted in a great increase in promiscuity among gay
men, along with significant changes in sexual practices that
made rectal trauma, immunological contact with semen, use of
recreational drugs, and the transmission of many viral, amoebal,
fungal, and bacterial infections far more common than in the
decades prior to 1970. The same data strongly suggest that
recent changes in sexual and drug activity played a major role in
vastly enlarging the homo- and bisexual male population at risk
for developing immunosuppression. Since promiscuity,
engaging in receptive anal intercourse, and fisting are the three
highest-risk factors associated with AIDS among gay men and
since each of these risk factors is correlated with known cases
of immunosuppression, they represent significant factors in our
understanding of why AIDS emerged as a major medical
problem only in 1970.” (Root-Bernstein, Rethinking AIDS: The
Tragic Cost of Premature Consensus, p. 290-291)
“Whatever the cause of AIDS, single or multi-factorial, it is
certain that the promiscuous homosexuals of the late seventies
and early eighties were fertile ground for an epidemic.” (Adams,
AIDS: The HIV Myth, p. 131)
“The primary factor that led to increase HIV transmission
was anal sex combined with multiple partners, particularly in
concentrated core groups. By the seventies there is little doubt
that for those in the most sexually active core groups,
multipartner anal sex had become a main event. Michael Callen,
both an avid practitioner and a careful observer of life in the
- 163 -
gay fast lane, believed that this was a historically
unprecendented aspect of the gay sexual revolution.” (Rotello,
Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men, p. 75)
“It was an historic accident that HIV disease first
manifested itself in the gay populations of the east and west
coasts of the United States, wrote British sociologist Jeffrey
Weeks in AIDS and Contemporary History in 1993. His
opinion has been almost universal among gay and AIDS
activists even to this day. Yet there is little accidental about the
sexual ecology described above. Multiple concurrent partners,
versatile anal sex, core group behavior centered in commercial
sex establishments, widespread recreational drug abuse,
repeated waves of STDs and constant intake of antibiotics,
sexual tourism and travel – these factors were not accidents.
Multipartner anal sex was encouraged, celebrated, considered a
central component of liberation. Core group behavior in baths
and sex clubs was deemed by many the quintessence of
freedom. Versatility was declared a political imperative.
Analingus was pronounced the champagne of gay sex, a
palpable gesture of revolution. STDs were to be worn like
badges of honor, antibiotics to be taken with pride.
Far from being accidents, these things characterized the
very foundation of what it supposedly meant to experience gay
liberation, Taken, together they formed a sexual ecology of
almost incalculably catastrophic dimensions, a classic feedback
loop in which virtually every factor served to amplify every
other. From the virus’s point of view, the ecology of liberation
was a royal road to adaptive triumph. From many gay men’s
point of view, it proved a trapdoor to hell on earth.” (Rotello,
Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men, p. 89)
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Allen, Peter Lewis. The Wages of Sin: Sex and Disease, Past and
Present. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago and London,
2000.
- 164 -
Altman, Dennis. AIDS in the Mind of America. Anchor
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Altman, Dennis. Defying Gravity: A Political Life. Allen &
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Andriote, John-Manuel. Victory Deferred: How AIDS Changed
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Hoffman, Martin. The Gay World Male Homosexuality and the
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Laumann, Edward O., Stephen Ellingson, Jenna Mahay,
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1996.
Turner, Charles F., Heather G. Miller and Lincoln E.
Moses, editors. AIDS Sexual Behavior and Intravenous Drug Use.
National Academy Press. Washington, D.C., 1989.
Weeks, Jeffery. Sexuality and Its Discontents: Meanings, Myths
and Modern Sexualities. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London,
1988.

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Chapter 10
Homosexual Identity Formation

The past 25 years we have seen an increasing number of


studies concerning homosexuality. These studies have dealt
with both the positive and negative effects of homosexuality.
There has been a focused attempt to validate homosexuality as
an alternate lifestyle. This research is both good and bad, in that
what is being studied itself is a new concept; a gay identity.
More importantly this research is questionable because of the
motives of the researchers themselves, many who have
accepted a gay identity and adopted a homosexual lifestyle. The
research has tended to emphasize the uniqueness of this gay
identity. In doing so they have created highly specialized bodies
of theory and research that are isolated from general fields of
study. This is a common problem of all new fields of studies.
Still we must be especially careful in researching homosexuality
because we are dealing with life-long consequences in the lives
of people who are choosing to accept what has always fallen
and continually falls outside the bounds of societal norms.
“Psychological theory, which should be employed to
described only individual mental, emotional, and behavioral
aspects of homosexuality, has been employed for building
models of personal developmental that purport to mark the
steps in an individual’s progression toward a mature and
egosyntonic gay or lesbian identity. The embracing and
disclosing of such an identity, however, is best understood as a
political phenomenon occurring in a historical period during
which identity politics has become a consuming occupation.”
(De Cecco and Parker, The Biology of Homosexuality: Sexual
Orientation or Sexual Preference?, p. 20 in Sex, Cells, and Same-Sex
Desire: The Biology of Sexual Preference, edited by De Cecco and
Parker)
“While some suggest that identity has become a watchword
of our times as it provides a much needed vocabulary in terms
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of how we define our loyalties and commitments (Shotter,
1993), others suggest that identity only becomes an issue when
it is in crisis. In this sense the crisis of identity occur, as Mercer
suggests, when something we assume to be fixed, coherent and
stable is displaced by the experience of doubt and uncertainty.
Within much of the recent social-scientific work on the topic,
the notion of identity as fixed, neutral and unproblematic has
been questioned. As Kitzinger (1998) suggests, rather than
viewing identities as freely created products of introspection, or
the reflections of some unproblematic inner self, they are more
accurately understood as being profoundly political, both in
origins and implications.” (Heaphy, Medicalisation and Identity
Formation: Identity and Strategy in the Context of AIDS and HIV, p.
139; article found in the following book by Weeks and Holland,
editors: Sexual Cultures Communities, Values, and Intimacy)
I am especially concerned with the theorizing and
promoting the concept of the formation of a homosexual/gay
identity. Individuals who have always been at a difficult stage of
life, adolescents, are being encouraged to accept this idea of a
homosexual/gay identity. Adolescence is a period of immense
physical, mental, psychosocial change and development in life.
An adolescent is one that is no longer a child, but not yet
mature enough to understand the changes going on. This is a
confusing time in life, a time of questioning. A period of time
for an individual who wants to remain close to their parents and
at the same time is seeking independence. It is during this
period of life that sexual and emotional bonding is beginning to
develop, typically along societal norms towards members of the
opposite sex. There is also same-sex sexual physical activity that
often takes place among adolescent males. But for some, a
sexual confusion may arise, and they feel attracted to members
of their own sex.
“Although turmoil theory has been largely refuted,
adolescence is still noted for its dynamic changes in physical
and psychological development, parental relations, self-esteem,
identity formation, and cognitive development. It is a time of
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pervasive adjustment to the vicissitude of the inner self and the
adult world.” (Mills, The Psychoanalytic Perspective of Adolescent
Homosexuality: A Review, p. 913)
“Homosexual activities are behaviors that are common in
adolescence and which may progressively contribute to sexual
orientation and identity. Like masturbation, homosexual activity
may be a means of experimentation and self-exploration. The
fantasies which accompany masturbation and allow the
adolescent to safely try out sexual possibilities and help him or
her manage infantile sexual propensities which surface at this
time of development. Early adolescent homosexuality carries
this process further to include another person who aids in the
process of self-discovery. Within this narcissistic alliance,
homosexual activity offers opportunities for comparison,
information gathering, experimentation reassurance, and help in
dealing with guilt over infantile wishes (Glasser, 1977).
Normal homosexual behavior in early adolescent boys is
distinguished from its counterpart in that there is a strong
preponderance of strong heterosexual interest in the
homosexual activity (Glasser, 1977). Homosexual
experimentation allows early adolescent boys to imagine what
girls are like and how they should be approach sexually. This
experimentation also helps them to integrate their own
feminine identifications into their own personality. Another
element of normal adolescent homosexual activity is that sexual
acts with older men are considered forbidden and taboo. Young
boys who experiment with homosexual activities view
themselves as very different from adult homosexuals and look
upon these men with disdain.” (Mills, The Psychoanalytic Perspective
of Adolescent Homosexuality: A Review, p. 918-919)
“Homosexual activities and homosexual identity in
adolescence should be viewed differently in terms of their
consequences. As a person progresses through the various
stages of adolescent development, homosexual experimentation
can be a means of self-discovery and ameliorating infantile
conflict. Normatively, by the time the person reaches late
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adolescence, these homosexual tendencies and activities have
abated and been replaced with a heterosexual orientation.”
(Mills, The Psychoanalytic Perspective of Adolescent Homosexuality: A
Review, p. 921)
“Adolescence is a time of exploration and experimentation;
as such sexual activity, does not necessarily reflect either
present or future sexual orientation. Confusion about sexual
identity is not uncommon in adolescents. Many youth engage in
same-sex behavior; attractions or behaviors do not mean that
an adolescent is lesbian or gay. Moreover, sexual activity is a
behavior, whereas sexual orientation is a component of identity.
Many teens experience a broad range of sexual behaviors that
are incorporated into an evolving sexual identity consolidated
over a period of time.” (Ryan and Futterman, Lesbian and Gay
Youth, p. 10)
In order to try to understand this idea, the concepts of
sexual orientation and a homosexual/gay identity have been
theorized. A variety of developmental stage models for a
homosexual/gay identity formation have been formulated
within recent years. All of these models accept and promote the
concept of coming out, which is a public annunciation of
accepting a homosexual/gay identity.
“Identity, according to Troiden, is a label which people
apply to themselves and which is representative of the self in a
specific social situation. Frequently, identity refers to placement
in a social category, such as homosexual, gender group, and so
on.” (Cox and Gallios, Gay and Lesbian Identity Developmental: A
Social Identity Perspective, p. 3)
“The process of assuming a self-definition as a lesbian, gay,
and bisexual is commonly referred to as coming out. ... The
term coming out originates in gay and lesbian culture. ... Thus
the term coming out, as used in the gay and lesbian community
and in the gay liberation movement, has always implied some
level of public declaration of ones homosexuality.” (Appleby
and Anastas, Not Just a Passing Phase, p. 66)

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“Coming out is viewed as the developmental process
through which an individual recognizes their sexual preference
for members of their own sex, and choosing to integrate this
knowledge into their personal lives.
Taken together, they describe a progression from vague
awareness of difference, through a gradual definition of sexual
feelings, to identification with a social category, and sometimes
beyond to a recontextualizing stage. These developmental
models affirm the idea that the homosexual orientation is an
inner potential, waiting to be discovered and expressed.”
(Lipkin, Understanding Homosexuality, Changing Schools: A Text for
Teachers, Counselors, and Administrators. p. 101)
“The common assumption is that GLB identities develop as
individuals work through conflicts and stresses that are related
to their sexual orientation. Resolving feelings of inner
confusion, ambivalence, and fear of rejection, they gradually
consolidate a affirmative sense of self that enables them to
accept and express their same-gender feelings. It is
hypothesized that this process is organized in a developmental
sequence of stages that is delineated in a somewhat different
way by each of the various models.” (Elizur and Ziv, Family
Support and Acceptance, Gay Male Identity Formation, and Psychological
Adjustment: A Path Model, p. 127)
As with all new fields of study, there are differing and some-
times contradicting ideas or theories. It is clearly seen that
humans grow developmentally physically, emotionally, and
mentally. This is how a gay identity is theorized to occur, in
developmental stages. The scholarship on the formation of
these theories primarily occurred in the fields of psychology
(Cass) and sociology (Coleman and Troiden).
“During the past decade, several investigators have
proposed theoretical models that attempt to explain the
formation of homosexualities (Cass, 1979, 1984; Coleman,
1982; Lee, 1977; Ponse, 1978; Schafer, 1976; Troiden, 1977,
1979; Weinberg, 1977, 1978). Although the various models
propose different numbers of stages to explain homosexual
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identity formation, they describe strikingly similar patterns of
growth and change as major hallmarks of homosexual identity
development. First, nearly all models view homosexual identity
formation as taking place against a backdrop of stigma. The
stigma surrounding homosexuality affects both the formation
and expression of homosexual identities. Second, homosexual
identities are described as developing over a protracted period
and involving a number of ‘growth points or changes’ that may
be ordered into a series of stages (Cass, 1984). Third,
homosexual identity formation involves increasing acceptance
of the label “homosexual as applied to the self. Fourth,
although coming out begins when individuals define themselves
as homosexual, lesbians and gay males typically report an
increased desire over time to disclose their homosexual identity
to at least some members of an expanding series of audiences.
Thus, coming out, or identity disclosure, takes place at a
number of levels: to self, to other homosexuals, to heterosexual
friends, to family, to coworkers, and to the public at large
(Coleman, 1982; Lee, 1977). Fifth, lesbians and gays develop
‘increasingly personalized and frequent’ social contacts with
other homosexuals over time (Cass, 1984).” (Garnets and
Kimmel, Psychological Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Male
Experiences, p. 195)
“Clinical and developmental psychologists first proposed
coming-out models or sexual identity models over two decades
ago. These theoretical constructions described the advent of a
same-sex identity through a series of invariant steps or stages by
which individuals recognize, make sense of, give a name to, and
publicize their status as lesbian or gay (bisexuality is seldom
addressed). The reification of these master models to explain
nonheterosexuality remains popular today. Although diverse in
conceptual underpinnings, they are nearly universal in their
stage sequences and assumptions regarding the ways in which
youths move from a private, at times unknown, same-sex
sexuality to a public, integrated sexuality.” (Savin-Williams,
Mom, Dad, I’m Gay, p. 16)
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Three models of homosexual/gay identity formation will be
looked at and then, one person’s merger of all three models
into a mega-model will be discussed. All models are based on
adult recollections. Coleman and Troiden have been accused of
male bias with their models. Also Horowitz and Newcomb in
their article, A Multidimensional Approach to Homosexual
Identity write that Troiden and Coleman have no empirical
validation whatsoever to their theorized models of
homosexual/gay identity formation. These stage models tend to
be linear in nature and are over simplistic. In doing so they thus
tend to deny the wide range and variety of individual
homosexual experiences.
Cass
The first person to formulate and publish a theory on a
homosexual identity formation was V. C. Cass in 1979. At the
time, she formulated her theory Cass was a Clinical
Psychologist at Murdoch University in Western Australia.
Cass’s model for homosexual/gay identity development uses six
stages. Her model is non-age specific and is not linear. The
individual may be in more than one stage at a time and also,
they may return to a previous stage. There are six stages in her
theory of homosexual identity formation.
1) Identity confusion. Am I a homosexual? In this first stage
an individual begins to recognize that I may be different. The
basis is on behavior, actions, feelings, and or thoughts in which
he may think he is different from others. These perceived
differences may be labeled homosexual. Resulting emotional
tension may be experienced in the form of confusion,
bewilderment, anxiety, etc. This emotional tension arises
because now there is the knowledge of a difference between
homosexual and heterosexual. There are three possible paths an
individual may take for resolution of this identity confusion.
This homosexual identity can be rejected and resisted, by
avoiding behaviors that are perceived to be homosexual and by
shutting out information that might confirm a homosexual
identity. A second path would be that this identity is accepted
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as legitimate, but yet undesirable. The third possible path would
be to accept the homosexual identity and evaluate it as
desirable.
2) Identity comparison. I may be a homosexual. An
individual’s reaction to being different may be positive, while
the individual continues to hide their acceptance of being a
homosexual from others. They may do this by trying to act as a
heterosexual. The individual may also have a negative reaction
to being different, seeking to avoid gay behavior, gay identity or
both, and this may result in self-hatred. While comparing
themselves to being homosexual, there is the possibility of
feeling alienated from heterosexual peers, family, and
community, while also having a sense of not belonging to
another community of similar people.
3) Identity tolerance. I am probably a homosexual. In this
stage an individual begins to tolerate a homosexual identity,
seeking out contact and acceptance from other homosexuals.
The type of contact will influence self-esteem and social skills.
Self-affirming interaction can lead to the next stage. However,
purely sexual contact, and without a gay identity or positive
socialization, may result in stunted development and possibly
be very damaging.
4) Identity acceptance. I am a homosexual. Relationships
within the family and with others may be problematic. He may
reveal to some people he is a homosexual, while denying it to
others. Social acceptance or rejection of this accepted
homosexual identity continues to cause problems for the
individual as he tries to live in two worlds.
5) Identity pride. There is a strong personal acceptance of
this homosexual identity. Though negative reactions by others
may shake pride, a stronger identification and interaction with
other homosexuals encourages pride in accepting a
homosexual/gay identity. As shame diminishes in accepting a
homosexual/gay identity, hiding one’s identity is questioned. In
this stage, one may have an us versus them or straight versus

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queer attitude. This also includes the possibly strong tension
between interacting with more groups.
6) Identity synthesis. Sexual orientation no longer is the
main determinant of one’s identity. Homosexuality is viewed as
one part of a multifaceted self. There is an ongoing reevaluation
of keeping a homosexual/gay identity separated from the other
segments of one’s identity. This is when the individual fully
accepts the homosexual/gay identity.
Coleman
Eli Coleman in 1982, proposed a model that has five stages,
for the formation of a homosexual/gay identity. When
Coleman first wrote about homosexuality/gay identity
formation he was associated with the University of Minnesota
Medical School. He is a psychologist and sex therapist, who has
also served on the editorial board for the Journal of
Homosexuality.
1) Pre-coming out. This is often a slow and painful process.
Within this process there is a preconscious awareness of an
attraction to members of the same sex. In this first stage the
individual may reject, deny, or repress his homosexuality. He is
aware of stigma, and does not want to admit, perhaps even to
himself, that he might be or is a homosexual. The stress of
dealing with these feelings may result in depression and can lead
to suicide.
2) Coming out. This stage begins in an initial acceptance of
and a reconciliation to their homosexuality. The first expression
to others, which includes a positive response, particularly from
family or close friends may lead to greater comfort and wider
disclosure. Conversely a negative response could send the
individual back to stage one. Now hiding from oneself requires
even greater levels of denial than before.
3) Exploration. Now the individual experiments with their
new identity both sexually and socially. They begin contact with
others in the gay community. There is often a homosexual
adolescence which includes promiscuity, infatuation, courtship,
and rejection. For the older individual, there is the possibility of
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shame at the seemingly immature impulses. If one then assumes
this stage is representative of their future gay life, they might try
to flee.
4) First relationship. A sense of attraction and sexual
competence may lead to the desire for deeper and more lasting
relationships. It requires skills to maintain a same-gender
connection in a hostile environment. The intense expectations,
passiveness, and mistrust can doom a first relationship. One
partner may rebel by pursing sex outside the relationship.
5) Integration. In this final stage the individual sees
themselves as a fully functioning person in their society. The
individual’s public and private selves become congruent. A
growing self-acceptance leads to a greater confidence and the
ability to sustain relationships. As openness and caring increase
possessiveness and mistrust diminishes. Though rejection is
grieved, it is not devastating.
Troiden
In 1989 Richard Troiden theorized a third model for the
formation of a homosexual/gay identity. Troiden uses an age
specific four-stage model for developing a homosexual identity.
He was an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology
and Anthropology at Miami University in Oxford, OH when he
developed his theory of homosexual identity formation.
Troiden is a gay sociologist. His model uses sociological theory,
which represents a synthesis and elaboration on previous
research. He called his model an ideal-typical model of gay
identity acquisition. To obtain data for his theory Troidan
interviewed 150 gay men. Participants to be interviewed were
gained by using a snowball technique that is they were found by
word of mouth.
Stage 1. Sensitization. This stage occurs before puberty,
and is generally not seen in a sexual context. Rather,
heterosexuality is accepted as the norm. So there is no
homosexual/heterosexual labeling to one’s feelings or
behaviors. What is noted is gender conformity or
nonconformity to activities. Though there are generalized
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feelings of marginality and perceptions of being different then
their same-sex peers. These perceptions are seen primarily in
childhood social experiences. It is the subsequent meanings and
labeling of childhood experiences, rather than the experiences
themselves, which are significant in the sensitization stage.
Stage 2. Identity Confusion. In this stage, there is a
confusion of identities. As specific things become personalized
and sexualized during adolescence an individual may begin
reflecting on the idea that their feelings and behaviors could be
regarded as homosexual. As a result, there is inner turmoil and
uncertainty around their ambiguous sexual status. No longer is
a heterosexual identity seen as a given, and as of yet there is, no
developed perceptions of having a homosexual identity. There
are several factors responsible for this identity confusion. One
is an altered perception of self. There is now along with gender
experiences, genital and emotional experiences that set them
apart from same-sex peers. Added confusion is seen when
responding to both heterosexual and homosexual feelings and
experiences. A third factor is the stigma surrounding
homosexuality. An additional factor is ignorance and inaccurate
knowledge about a social category for these behaviors and
feelings. How does one become a member of this category?
Stage 3. Identity Assumption. A homosexual/gay identity
becomes both a self-identity and a presented identity. Now that
this homosexual/gay identity is tolerated, there is association
with other homosexuals, exploration of a homosexual
subculture, and sexual experimentation. Although a homosexual
identity is assumed during this stage, it is first tolerated, and it is
accepted later.
Stage 4. Commitment. An individual adopts
homosexuality as a way of life. There is a self-acceptance and a
comfort with a homosexual/gay identity. More emphasis is
placed on this identity being a way of life, state of being, and an
essential identity than a set of behaviors or sexual orientation.

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Lipkin
One of the most recent attempts to theorize a homosexual
identity model is by Arthur Lipkin in his book, Understanding
Homosexuality, Changing Schools: A Text for Teachers, Counselors, and
Administrators. Lipkin is graduated from Harvard University,
taught in public schools in Cambridge, M.A. He is an instructor
and research associate at the Harvard Graduate School of
Education. Using the three models just discussed, Lipkin
combines them into a mega-model of five stages.
“1. Pre-Sexuality (Troiden 1)
Preadolescent nonsexual feelings of difference and
marginality.
2. Identity Questioning (Coleman 1; Cass 1, 2; Troiden 2)
Ambiguous, repressed, sexualized same-gender feelings
and/or activities. Avoidance of stigmatized label.
3. Coming Out (Coleman 2, 3, 4; Cass 3, 4; Troiden 3)
Toleration then acceptance of identity through contact with
gay/lesbian individuals and culture. Exploration of sexual
possibilities and first erotic relationships. Careful, selective self-
disclosure outside gay /lesbian community.
4. Pride (Coleman 5; Cass 5; Troiden 4)
Integration of sexuality into self. Capacity for love
relationships. Wider self-disclosure and better stigma
management.
5. Post-Sexuality (Cass 6)
A diminishment of centrality of homosexuality in self-
concept and social relations.”
(Lipkin, Understanding Homosexuality, Changing Schools: A Text
for Teachers, Counselors, and Administrators, p. 103-104)
Weaknesses of the theories
Now that these models, which theorize the formation of a
homosexual/gay identity, have been discussed, let us look at
some of the problems, limitations, and pitfalls that even those
authors advocating for homosexuality themselves warn about.
“One of the problems with a linear model is that it is
assumed that those who reach the final stage have all passed
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through the same series of steps. Research designed to
document stage-sequential models, however, reveal diversity as
well as patterns; the more specific the stages or steps were in a
given model, the less likely the stages matched the experiences
of the different individuals under study (Sophie, 1986).” (Heyl,
Homosexuality: A Social Phenomenon, p. 331 in Human Sexuality:
The Societal and Interpersonal Context, Kathleen McKinney and
Susan Sprecher)
“Almost everything known about the coming out process is
in question, such as how it happens (e. g., a discovered essential
lesbian, gay, or bisexual identity or a socially constructed
identity), when it happens, its order or disorder, and whether
there is an end state to the process or whether it is always open-
ended.” (Hunter, Shannon, Knox and Martin, Lesbian, Gay, and
Bisexual Youths and Adults, p. 67)
All of these theories are retrospective in nature, based on
homosexual male adults recalling their childhood. We are
talking about adults adding labels and definitions to childhood
feelings, emotions, behaviors, etc. The young child expresses
his experiences in terms of gender conforming/nonconforming
behavior and not sexual behavior. A young child may have a
perception of being different from his peers, but he does not
have the vocabulary to express it. It is during puberty and
throughout adolescence, when these feelings and behaviors
become sexualized. Also, they now have the vocabulary to
begin seeing themselves as heterosexual or homosexual. The
cultural stigma towards homosexuality now has greater
meaning. Adding to their confusion are the many sexual stimuli,
and as well as the fact that the adolescent body usually responds
to both homosexual and heterosexual cues. There is a blurring
of sexual cues, emotional and physical responses in
adolescence, and one may be attracted toward members of both
sexes. It is a very confusing time for them.
“Notwithstanding these contributions, identity formation
models have come under increasing criticism during the last
decade for: (a) over-emphasizing the differences between
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gay/lesbian and heterosexual families, and under-emphasizing
the diversity among the former (Laird, 1993) and (b) not being
sufficiently sensitive to the social, cultural, and historical
contexts in which GLB identity formation occurs (Boxer and
Cohler, 1989; Cox and Gallois, 1996; Eliason, 1996). There are
significant variations among these models and discrepancies
have been found between the proposed developmental
sequences and the experiences of GLB respondents (Eliason,
1996; Herdt, 1996; Sophie, 1985/1986).” (Elizur and Ziv,
Family Support and Acceptance, Gay Male Identity Formation, and
Psychological Adjustment: A Path Model, p. 128)
“Much of the research on same-sex identity formation
presumes some underlying and stable core trait of sexual
orientation that is expressed or experienced and that then leads
to the formation of an identity based upon the available social
categories (Cass, 1979; Coleman, 1981/1982b; Troiden, 1979).
Thus, such models tend to be linear, positing a single pathway
and set sequence of stages in development of such an identity
and defining a specific end objective to this process. Especially
in earlier models of gay and lesbian identity formation, the
progression through such stages is freighted with moralistic and
social/political overtones. These models of identity
development typically ignore the potential for ongoing shifts in
identity across the life course and fail to critically examine
cultural assumptions that underlie such developmental
schemes.” (Savin-Williams and Cohen, The Lives of Lesbians,
Gays, and Bisexuals Children to Adults, p. 442-443)
“One reason for the failure of the specific stage theories to
account for the diversity of experience of participants is the
assumption of linearity which underlies these theories.”
(Sophie, A Critical Examination of Stage. Theories of Lesbian Identity
Formation, p. 50)
Troiden himself cautions against taking his model of a
homosexual identity formation too literally. As a whole these
models are largely descriptive and atheoretical. These models
are gross generalizations, ideal types, which vary from
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individual to individual. It is not a one size fits all model. In
doing so they neglect to identify how the individual identity
develops in relation to group identity. Research that has
included female subjects has yielded some apparent differences
in development between lesbians and gay males. The research
data was taken from small sample sizes and without
heterosexual comparison groups, i.e. individuals acquiring a
heterosexual orientation. The use of stage models inherently
applies linearity, with implication to an end state and carries the
risk of model reification. What is being observed now is that
these theories of homosexual/gay identity formation may not
be applicable to generations after the generational cohort that
entered adolescence in the 1960s and 1970s. The experiences of
adolescents in the 1990s who acquire a homosexual/gay
identity are in a more rapid manner. This may be due in part
because of the coming out of earlier generations. Or it may be
because these theories of homosexual/gay identity formation
are not a faithful rendering of the process individuals actually
have gone through. These models of homosexual/gay identity
formation are relatively silent on the psychological processes
occurring in gay and lesbian individuals before the discrete and
dramatic process termed coming out.
“Most profoundly they are true – at least in a universal
sense. Although a linear progression is intuitively appealing,
extant research suggests it seldom characterizes the lives of real
sexual-minority youth.” (Savin-Williams, Mom, Dad, I’m Gay, p.
16)
“Although coming-out models are inherently male-centric,
recent research suggests that they do not even characterize the
lives of current cohorts of males with same-sex attraction.”
(Savin-Williams, Mom, Dad, I’m Gay, p. 17)
Perhaps the most critical weakness of these models of
homosexual/gay identity formation is that these developmental
stage models assume an essential theoretical orientation, sexual
identity involves learning what one is and that a homosexual is
a form of being. Yet advocates for these theories of
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homosexual identity try to deny this underlying assumption of
homosexual essentiality. This is how Troiden tries to express it
in the following quotes.
“First, gay identities are not viewed as being acquired in an
absolute, fixed, or final sense. One of the main assumptions of
this model is that identity is never fully acquired, but is always
somewhat incomplete, forever subject to modification.”
(Troiden, Born Gay? A Critical review of Biological Research on
Homosexuality, p. 372)
“Nor is the model meant to convey the idea that gay
identity development is inevitable for those who experience the
first stages. Rather, each stage is viewed as making the
acquisition of a gay identity more probable, but not as an
inevitable determinant.” (Troiden, Born Gay? A Critical Review of
Biological Research on Homosexuality, p. 372)
“It is quite possible that as adolescents, young adults, or
even as adults, a relatively large number of males consciously
test the extent in which they may be sexually attracted to other
men. As a consequence of such sexual experimentation, a
substantial number of males may decide that homosexuality is
not for them and choose to leave the scene entirely.” (Troiden,
Born Gay? A Critical Review of Biological Research on Homosexuality,
p. 372)
The earlier discussion of esentialism verses social
constructionism views of homosexuality is once again seen here
in our present discussion of these models of the formation of a
homosexuality/gay identity. Savin-Williams and Cohen who
advocate for homosexuality write about this in their book.
“Much of the research on same-sex identity formation
presumes some underlying and stable core trait of sexual
orientation that is expressed or experienced and that then leads
to the formation of an identity based upon the available social
categories (Cass, 1979; Coleman, 1981/1982b; Troiden, 1979).
Thus, such models tend to be linear, positing a single pathway
and set sequence of stages in development of such an identity
and defining a specific end objective to this process. Especially
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in earlier models of gay and lesbian identity formation, the
progression through such stages is freighted with moralistic and
social/political overtones. These models of identity
development typically ignore the potential for ongoing shifts in
identity across the life course and fail to critically examine
cultural assumptions that underlie such developmental
schemes.” (Savin-Williams and Cohen, The Lives of Lesbians,
Gays, and Bisexuals Children to Adults, p. 442-443)
Humans grow and mature physically, emotionally, sexually
and in mental capacity. It is evident that we grow in
developmental stages, yet what is not so evident is what can be
contributed to nature versus nurture. Is one born a homosexual
or did one learn homosexuality. We have the capacity to
respond both positively and negatively to a variety of stimuli.
These outcomes are visible to others and to the individual
himself.
Applying these to our sexuality we will realize many
interesting things. Sexuality is primarily a learned cultural
phenomenon. We must be aware that our physical bodies will
respond sexually to a variety of stimuli, just as it responds to
many sensory stimuli. We are living and growing beings.
“The research on identity development documented not
only that individuals followed different paths for reaching new
identities, but also that identities, once formed, were not always
as stable and permanent as people had thought they would be.
Golden (1987) concludes that the assumption that we
inherently strive for congruence between our sexual feelings,
activities, and identities may not be warranted, and that given
the fluidity of sexual feelings, congruence may not be an
achievable state (p.31). Thus, behavior, emotions, and identities
do not necessarily develop into stable packages that can be
easily labeled as heterosexual, gay or lesbian, or even bisexual,
even though the individual or the society or the gay community
might desire such consistency.” (Heyl, Homosexuality: A Social
Phenomenon, p. 333 in Human Sexuality: The Societal and
Interpersonal Context, Kathleen McKinney and Susan Sprecher)
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“Thus, the process of the development of a lesbian identity
or a change in sexual orientation in general, must be viewed in
context of current social and historical conditions.” (Sophie, A
Critical Examination of Stage. Theories of Lesbian Identity Formation,
p. 50)
“Existing sociocultural arrangements define what sexuality
is, the purposes it serves, its manner of expression, and what it
means to be sexual.” (Troiden in Psychological Perspectives on
Lesbian and Gay Male Experiences, p. 191)
“Because sexual learning occurs within specific historical
eras and sociocultural settings, sexual conduct and its meanings
vary across history and among cultures.” (Troiden in Psychological
Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Male Experiences, p. 192)
“Developmental stage models have traditionally been used
to describe the process necessary to arrive at a healthy
homosexual identity, a healthy homosexual is always considered
the final stage of the model and requires integrating
homosexuality into broader personal identity. Anything short of
this integration is judged to be incomplete or less than optimal
outcome.” (Horowitz and Newcomb, A Multidimensional
Approach to Homosexual Identity, p. 2)
We must therefore take a very cautious approach to the use
of theories, such as a homosexual identity to validate
homosexuality as an alternate lifestyle to adolescents, who are
themselves in a very confusing time in their lives. How does
one separate the behavior from the identity?
“Self-categorization is not merely an act of self-labeling, but
adoption over time of the normative (prototypical behavior,
characteristics, and values associated with the particular group
membership.” (Cox and Gallios, Gay and Lesbian Identity
Development: A Social Identity Perspective, p. 11)
“Sexual behavior plays a significant role in the development
of sexual-minority (gay and bisexual) males. Research spanning
the last three decades illustrate that sexual-minority males
exhibit greater sexual freedom-engage in more sex with partners
(Blumstein and Schwartz, 1983), meeting more partners in
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highly sexualized environments (Blumstein and Schwartz,
1983), approving of sex without love (Klinkenberg and Rose,
1994; Lever, 1994; Tripp, 1975), reporting more sex partners
(Blumstein and Schwartz, 1983; Lever, 1994), and developing
sexually nonexclusive romantic relationships (Blumstein and
Schwartz, 1983; Kurdek, 1989, McWhirter and Mattison, 1984)
than their heterosexual and lesbian counterparts. Extant
research suggests that sexual behavior facilitates the
development of close relationships and the garnering of friends
(Klinkenberg and Rose, 1993; Nardi, 1992).” (Dube, The Role of
Sexual Behavior in the Identification Process of Gay and Bisexual Male,
p. 123)
More important, if the final stage of these models is a
healthy homosexual the truth of the matter as seen in the lives
of many of those who have accepted a homosexual identity
reveals the failure of these models.
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Contents

 Chapter 1: Essentialism or Social Constructionism / 5


 Chapter 2: Biological Basis for Homosexuality / 21
 Chapter 3: “Gay Brains” and Gay Genes” / 31
 Chapter 4: Types of Homosexualities / 67
 Chapter 5: Types of Homosexualities/Age-Structured /
78
 Chapter 6: Types of Homosexualities/Gay and Lesbian
Homosexual Identity / 115
 Chapter 7: Stonewall and the American Psychiatric
Association / 135
 Chapter 8: “Circuit Parties” and “Gay Male Clone” / 146
 Chapter 9: Gay Male Homosexual and Sexual Behavior of
Gay Male Homosexuals / 155
 Chapter 10: Homosexual Identity Formation / 166

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Does a homosexual exist just as mankind is of the
species, Homo Sapiens? Is a homosexual orientation
intimately intertwined with a person’s true identity as a
human being? When using the term homosexual, is one
accurately defining a person’s self, his inner core, and
the nature of his being? If it is true, then homosexuality
may be implied as natural, and that it is essential to
their human wholeness. There are those advocating for
homosexuality who hold such a view, that one is born a
homosexual. But there are others advocating for
homosexuality who hold a conflicting view, that
homosexuality only has the meaning which is given to
it by the society and culture it is a part of.

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